Your Stories, Your Museum is an interactive, student-led course designed specifically for incoming transfer students. In this seminar, the Burke Museum becomes your classroom, research site, and creative studio as you explore how personal experience, culture, and storytelling shape the way knowledge is created and shared.

Working with the Burke’s cultural collections from Oceania and Asia, you’ll conduct individual and group research that invites you to consider how museums represent communities, and how your own voice and perspective can challenge, expand, or reshape those narratives. This course recognizes that transfer students arrive with rich experiences and insights, and it centers those perspectives as essential to the learning process.

Class meetings take place inside the Burke Museum and include multiple museum visits, giving you access to galleries, collections, and behind-the-scenes spaces most visitors never see. You’ll collaborate closely with classmates and a community artist on two creative projects that blend research, storytelling, and design.

The course culminates in creating a pop-up exhibit in the Burke’s first-floor workroom, where you’ll turn your ideas and research into something tangible and share it with a public audience. Along the way, you’ll build skills in collaboration, research, creative thinking, and communicating ideas that translate across majors and future career paths.

No prior museum or art experience is required, just curiosity, creativity, and a willingness to engage.

Learn more about the instructor of this course:

Teaching Professor Holly Barker, UW in Sociocultural Anthropology, Curator for Oceanic & Asian Culture at the Burke Museum.