Language, culture, history, and cultural heritage are extremely important “types of weapons” in the Ukrainian people’s arsenal in the current struggle with the Russian aggressor and its propaganda for freedom, national identity preservation, and Ukrainian’s territorial integrity. The key role in this context is played by the civil-patriotic activity of professionals employed in the sphere of education, culture, art, and tourist and tour operation service.
Since 2006 Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University has been preparing specialists with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees majoring in 027 Museum and Heritage Studies. A significant part of our graduates work as tour guides in museums, national parks, travel companies, excursion bureaus, etc., contributing to Ukraine’s historical and cultural heritage conservation, updating and popularization.
Tour guide is not just a job or profession, it is a mission and a way of life. It is not that easy to become a real tour guide because along with the significant experience, theoretical background, interesting, up-to-date tour organization and other travel services, this profession representatives should constantly work on their own image formation and their professional skills improvement.
Each excursion has to become a high-quality product, an interesting socio-cultural service that meets spiritual and intellectual demands of tourists, a kind of tool for “patriotic upbringing” and Ukrainian history and culture popularization. For this purpose a modern tour guide should not only regularly and thoroughly work on preparing, organizing and conducting a tour, but also work on themselves, their knowledge, experience, skills (for instance, skillfully combining display and narration, and various methodological approaches to conducting tours), personal qualities, communicative, constructive, analytical, organizational and creative abilities, personal style, etc.
On 21 June the workshop “Tour Guide’s Professional Excellence” with distance learning technologies implementation was held for the 3rd year “027 Museum and Heritage Studies” students within the course “History and Practice of Tour Operation”. Students analyzed guide’s professional excellence and Ukrainian famous tour guides’ skills and worked on their own improvement of tour operation proficiency, doing different interesting tasks and exercises.
Tetiana TROFIMUK-KYRYLOVA, Associate Professor
at the Department of Museum and Memory Studies,
Information and Analitical Activity,
Head of the Excursion Bureau of the Faculty of History,
Political Science and National Security
