Docents' trait : a docent-led approach in enriching visitors' experience in cultural tours : a case study of "our rocking city" by HULU culture

Abstract

The term docent is from the Latin word “docere” meaning “to teach”. In the contemporary tourism literature, docents is one of the subsets under the umbrella of tour guide and defines as “professional and effective volunteers who takes visitors to tour the museum in limited duration for free”. Nowadays, docents are not only attach in the museum and art gallery but also provide help in visitor centers or outdoor sites.

Although there were lots of training, guidelines and even literatures define what a docent should do in conducting tours, very few of them investigate what docents’ view on their tasks and how they handle a group of visitors with different needs in realistic setting. Thus, understanding how the docents perceived their roles in tours and how they perform in actual practice would definitely help the tour organizers to develop tailor-made training programmes that fit docents’ needs and retain the volunteers for long term.

This research explores how docents perceive their roles as an experience broker and how do they interact with visitors in the cultural tours designed by a non-profit organization in Hong Kong. The resultant dissertation from the research aims to examine docents’ views on enriching visitor experience as well as their performance in practical setting – conducting local cultural tours for Hong Kong residents. The case study approach has been adopted, focusing on the cultural tours in the “Our Rocking City” project organized by HULU Culture in June 2015.