December 3, 2009
History cubed: Burke Boxes are like traveling museums
They were started by Erna Gunther, the Burke Museum’s educator and later director, back in the 1930s. And since then, like traveling ambassadors of their home museum they have been viewed — and their contents even touched — by more than seven million school children statewide.
They are Burke Boxes, and are an understandable source of pride at the museum. “Burke Boxes are amazing,” said Diane Quinn, the Burke’s longtime director of education. Briana Nino, the museum’s educational outreach manager, who oversees the day-to-day aspects of the program, said in an e-mail that the boxes “are all very exciting because they are full of awesome, amazing things that you just don’t see every day.”
Quinn defined the boxes as “touchable, hands-on teaching collections” that represent the museum’s way of “getting collection materials outside the museum walls — and not in a random way but in an organized way. They are actually individual collections that reflect the Burke’s collecting areas.”
There are 62 boxes in all, on 30 different topics. There are Burke Boxes about the natural world such as bats, birds, fish, fossils, insects, mammals, invertebrates and owls as well as minerals, historical sites, native peoples of the Northwest and Puget Sound and dozens more. There’s even a box dedicated to the Day of the Dead. See the whole list and learn more about the program online here.
Each box is developed with educators and comes classroom-ready with study materials designed in alignment with the Washington State Essential Academic Learning Requirements created by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. They are a way for classroom teachers to supplement their study on a host of topics.
“The schools request them, we market them, we schedule them — it’s just like a library,” said Quinn. Between 400 and 500 boxes go out each year, she said — to day camps and private education programs as well as public schools. UW classrooms use the boxes, too, she said. “The uses of the Burke Boxes are varied and vast,” Quinn said.
The creation of boxes is an ongoing project. Most recently, Quinn said, “we made a new set of science boxes and a beautiful new bird box — the first in 30 years. It’s really stunning.”
Nino, who promotes the Burke Box program online, in public events and in conferences and workshops with teachers, also praised the bird box, which has selections of regional birds packaged in clear tubes. “This innovative packaging gives students the opportunity to pick up a full bird skin and examine it from all angles.” She said the box, now with a new curriculum, “has a huge wow factor.”
Both also spoke highly of the new box about Coast Salish Canoes.
Nino wrote, “six hand-carved canoe models illustrate the tradition of building a Coast Salish Canoe. Starting with a full log, each model brings you one step closer to the finished canoe that was vital to the Coast Salish way of life in Puget Sound.”
Nino adds that the box program is ably accomplished “with the help of a few key players in the Burke Education Office and the general support of the Burke Museum administration, curators, collection managers, education staff and museology students.”
From their roots last century with Erna Gunther — back when they were called Traveling Study Collections — Burke Boxes have opened minds and furthered the mission of the museum to serve the region.
Quinn said the heart of the program is making these objects accessible to the public. And the Burke Boxes rarely fail to impress.
“People have this totally other reaction when they come in and start taking the lids off,” Quinn said. “They are totally wowed … you just don’t think of the potential your collection has for this type of outreach until you see it.”
The accessibility is a plus, too. After all, Quinn said, “most people who come to a museum don’t get to touch anything.”
