A Conversation With the Smokies’ Education Chief

Hired in July 2020 as deputy chief of resource education at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Stephanie Kyriazis has been serving as the acting chief of that department ever since, and under quite unusual conditions. 

Supervising visitor services and education programming is a big part of her job, and with the Coronavirus pandemic drastically impacting how park personnel interact with the public, she’s had to be creative from day one. 

Why did you move to the Smokies in the middle of a pandemic? 

Well, actually this wasn’t my first experience at the Smokies. In spring of 2019 I did a three-month detail at the park. I was looking to explore what it would be like to move from smaller parks into a leadership role at a bigger park. I wasn’t looking specifically to the Smokies as a place to do that, but when I got here I just fell in love. I was here in spring, so of course the wildflowers were spectacular. The staff in resource education is so seasoned and thoughtful and creative and motivated and there’s the park itself—just being in these beautiful mountains, geologically ancient, biologically rich. It was a big draw and of course the management team here is fantastic, so it caught my eye. I jumped at the chance to apply to the job here.

How did you have to adapt your approach in light of the pandemic? 

It’s been an evolving thing because the world is learning to understand how this pandemic works over time. Prior to my arrival the park had shut down for several months, and then it reopened with certain precautions in place. In the early days we were doing no events and no in-person programming. We were providing information at the Visitor Center and we were really amping up our digital service offerings. In some ways, that was an opportunity for us because a lot of that content could use an update and refresh, and it gave staff the opportunity to really cultivate their skills in the digital arena. And so I think in some ways we managed to make lemonade out of this situation. That said, in-person programming when rangers can respond intimately to the questions of the six-year-old, or the story of a person from another place who’s experienced salamanders in their backyard, those opportunities for connections have been put on hiatus. 

How do you expect educational programming to look in 2021? 

Large events are still a little bit on the fence. Some of them are scaling back. Some of them, especially in the early season, are still canceled for this year. Even towards the end of 2020, we were experimenting with rangers providing roving programming so they’d be out among people, but maybe not having a formal program or the same group of people come together for an hour. We also did do some work with schools and students outdoors in their schoolyards, where everybody could be masked and in the fresh air. So we did start a trend in that direction at the end of last season and we’re going to continue more of that this year.

What long-term projects are you working on? 

We’re getting significant momentum on our African American experience project. We’re expecting reports back on ground-penetrating radar studies of some cemeteries that have enslaved folks buried there, and Antoine Fletcher and his intern Atalaya Dorfield have been conducting a number of oral histories with local folks who have a connection to the Smokies. So, that’s exciting. We’ve also just launched an internal pilot project called the Smokies media studio, where we’re really looking to invest over the next few years in leveraging the great talents of the Great Smoky Mountains Association creative team as well as internal talents across different media platforms, recognizing that with over 12 million visitors a year it’s not possible for us to talk to everybody who comes into the park. Yet, we want folks to have opportunities to understand how to be safe in the park, how to protect the resources that they’re enjoying and how to form connections with the place.