Who, What, Why: Kara Butler on museum education

Kara Butler likes old things. She loves museums and history, enjoys police procedurals and soap operas (“‘The Bold and the Beautiful?’ Wow, that’s my show,” she says),—and inherited an interest in scrapbooking from her mother.

Butler, a fourth-year anthropology and communication double-major from Philadelphia, also loves talking to people and asking questions.

“My interest in what I want to do post-grad has shaped itself into being—shocker!—museums and specifically museum education, the educational programming that’s in museums and how exhibits are designed,” she says. After graduation, she will pursue her master’s in education, culture, and society from the Graduate School of Education, examining the role of museums as vehicles for public education.

Butler first interned at the Penn Museum in high school through the Bloomberg Arts Internship program and returned the summer after her first year at Penn through the Summer Humanities Internship Program. Working with the museum’s Learning and Community Engagement Department, she designed a self-guided tour for college-aged visitors, with a goal of capturing and engaging different audiences. 

Over the past year, she has been working remotely for the SPIRITS Museum in Virginia, which advances scholarly research on colonial-era distillation—not just alcohol, Butler says, but also perfume. This has involved researching the rum trade and the beverage’s fall-off in the United States as whiskey became more popular.

Last summer, she visited the Imperial War Museum London for another project: researching the intersection of World War II-era wartime propaganda and childhood for her Wolf Humanities Center undergraduate fellowship. There, she saw children’s clothing featuring a picture of a kid with a missile and comics of kids pretending to be soldiers. Butler is interested in the ideologies that kids picked up and in parallels between how Americans and Japanese portrayed children.

With interests in history, museums, and people, Butler knew in high school that she wanted to study anthropology, but a suggestion from a professor put her on the path toward double majoring in communication. As a student at Lankenau Environmental Science Magnet High School in Roxborough, Butler participated in a dual enrollment program at Penn, and her professor recommended she take Ritual Communication, which she did once enrolled at Penn.

Taking this ethnography-based course opened her eyes to the breadth of communication as a field beyond her previous associations with journalism and marketing. She says that communication courses have given her the tools to communicate anthropological findings accessible to non-experts who visit museums—places she loves for their public education mission and for the opportunity they offer visitors to learn and interpret information in different ways.

“In high school, I just liked to go to museums because I liked to learn,” Butler says. “Now, it’s because a, I like to learn and b, I like to see how other people interact with the same material. Is there something that somebody is more drawn to than I would be? You can go to a museum seven times and probably have most of the material memorized, but when you’re going with a different group of people, it’s a different journey every single time.”