Mutuality in Museum Evaluation: Engaging Educational Tourists for Interpretive Design Feedback in a Rural Community Cultural Heritage Museum in Belize

Museum interpretation plays a vital role in communicating exhibit content to diverse audiences. Yet, small, volunteer-run museums often lack the resources to study the relationship between interpretation and visitor experience and then use data-driven decisions to improve it. In this paper, we explore an example of how a small, rural community museum in Belize, Central America, developed a visitor engagement activity aimed at understanding the experiences of educational tourists, one of the museum’s target audiences. We describe the development, implementation, and results of a self-guided activity designed to meet the learning goals of a visiting student group. This exercise also served to gather essential information for enhancing meaningful access to the museum’s content through the improvement of object labels.