Visitors to Conner Prairie's living-history exhibit are coming away with a richer experience thanks to a series of projects analyzing spoken language by a Ball State professor.

Mary Theresa Seig, an English department faculty member, has spent the past five years assisting Conner Prairie change the way workers at Prairietown, a restored and recreated 1836 Indiana frontier village located in Fishers, interact with visitors.

Park workers - known as interpreters - dressed in clothing from the period, now "interact with visitors instead of speaking from a prepared script, which creates the opportunities for better learning," she said.

Through funding initially provided by Ball State, Seig examined how interpreters talked to visitors by recording family conversations as they toured the museum. Conner Prairie staff and Seig then examined several thousand pages of transcripts to find that the museum's mission as a learning environment was not being fulfilled.

"In 2001, when we first analyzed the data, we found that the interpreters 'interacted' with visitors in much the same way an information plaque does at a museum," Seig said. "The communication was very one-sided - straight from the interpreters to the visitors, who were in a passive role. They listened to the interpreters, didn't ask questions and left to go to another post at the museum."

Seig said the research demonstrated one stark finding: that the museum's daily program of living-history interpretation was not reaching its potential. As a result, Conner Prairie enlisted a team, including Seig, to change the park's culture. Called the Opening Doors Initiative, the project reoriented interpreters to a variety of ways to interact with visitors.

"Taking what we know about learning theory and discourse analysis, the interpreters are instructed to follow the guests' interests," Seig said. "Interpreters then engage visitors in conversations to find out what they want to know more about." 

The transformation of the park's communications efforts was so successful that Conner Prairie - again with Seig's help - was awarded additional funding to develop an educational DVD designed to assist museums in revamping their communications with visitors by envisioning those interactions more broadly.

"Since Conner Prairie changed the way interpreters interact with visitors, we had one young boy ask about the sports the children of the era played, which he thought would be baseball," she said. "The interpreter drew the boy and his family into a discussion about a sport called rounders, which is a sport that predates baseball. The family enjoyed the discussion and through this interaction, they all learned something."

Seig praises Conner Prairie, which was established in 1934 and now draws more than 300,000 visitors annually, as one of the best examples of a living history museum because of its efforts to create authentic conversations between interpreters and visitors.

"At Conner Prairie, we demonstrated the understanding that people learn better when they get involved and are immersed in history," Seig said. "What better way to understand something than talk about it with someone who lives history every day?"