Honoring a memorialized past while being responsive to the needs of contemporary visitors is a challenge for heritage tourism managers. Visitor-employed photography (VEP) and a means–end investigation were used to identify, organize, and explain numerous descriptions of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. Nine images were obtained through VEP and used during 71 on-site interviews (41 Anglo and 30 Hispanic visitors). Four primary meanings about the images were articulated by visitors, including patriotism, remembering and reembracing history, multiculturalism, and identity. However, the explanations given to achieve these outcomes differed between Anglo and Hispanic respondents. Managerial implications in relation to heritage tourism sites were discussed.
The Ed.D. program in Heritage Leadership for Sustainability, Social Justice, and Participatory Culture at the University of Missouri—St. Louis helps students cultivate the mindsets and skill sets required to sustain, pluralize, and enliven heritage in the public sphere. Although the program primarily meets synchronously online, the January 2020 “Wintercession” field trip to heritage sites in Montgomery, Alabama, provided an opportunity for face-to-face interactions, deep conversation, and reflection. Curricular, conversational, and collaborative inquiry deepened awareness and activated activism toward issues of racial justice. The use of high-impact practices (Kuh, 2008) allowed the cohort and faculty mentors to delve further into heritage leadership themes, including: confronting difficult emotions, recognizing sanctified space, facilitating group bonding and trust building, identifying models for activism, and moving forward in activism. We argue that the emergence of these themes demonstrates the value of immersing students and faculty in a shared, high-impact experience that focused on awareness, remembering, and wondering—the process of imagining the not yet (Keenan-Lechel et al., 2019)—as a means to “activate activism” in a cohort-based Ed.D. program.
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