TEHIC-Handbook_of_best_practices

5. Heritage interpretation and university education 75 initiatives for its formal tertiary education emerge all the way from researchers in already well-established fields such as pedagogy, history, geography, ethnology, or various nat - ural sciences, as well as from more recently established museology or heritage studies, or even from environmental studies. This diversity is not surprising, and while it might seem quite confusing it actually reflects the importance and attractiveness of heritage interpretation in today’s world. Keeping all the above in mind, our task is now to look at formal, mainly universi - ty-based heritage interpretation academic curricula and training in Europe, and in this sense, we should point out the following challenging issues: · Heritage interpretation, as a recognised field of study (which is usually a precondi - tion for having university-based programmes) is not ‘a separate island’: it is heavily interconnected with the idea of heritage per se , as well as many other scientific disci - plines. · As long as heritage interpretation is not recognised as a sub-scientific discipline by the academia it will hardly be included in university syllabuses at the bachelor’s, mas - ter’s (ideal option) or doctoral levels. · The best option for including heritage interpretation in tertiary education is, in most cases 2 , to incorporate it into existing heritage studies of university curricula. Oth - erwise, it might be either ignored or over-dominated by well-established disciplines and programmes. The ‘battle’ for Museology/Museum Studies as a case study B enchmarking is a particularly useful tool for assessing something by comparison with other similar things, and/or with a given standard, where a standard is set. While this tool comes from economics, and mainly from marketing, and is usually applied to commercial sectors for measuring products, services, and processes against compa- nies and organizations known to be leaders in one or several aspects of their businesses, the same practice could be applied to any human related activity. To the extent that we are discussing the higher or lesser importance of including heritage interpretation in formal university education in Europe we might look, with a 2 To learn more about this subject, see chapter “One size does not fit all.”