UC Santa Cruz

Barnstorm is an opportunity unique to the University of California, Santa Cruz, and few universities elsewhere offer a similar program. Functioning as both an independent theater company and a university course, it offers a practical and diverse education for its participants. Through my four years as an undergraduate in Barnstorm, I felt that the educational aspect had been slowly deteriorating. Many of the students seemed to be uninterested in learning about the different aspects of theater and were only putting in effort towards their specific productions. This led to a group of students not realizing the potential Barnstorm provides. As a student, and now manager, I believe it is one of the manager’s responsibilities to ensure that Barnstorm continues to provide an interdisciplinary education, in which the students learn about the different aspects of theater and understand the connection between them.

In this thesis, I analyze previous Barnstorm managers’ work as I believe it is important to use traditions and the past as a foundation for new ideas. Using their findings, I made specific changes to management styles and to the course, in the hopes that students would realize the education Barnstorm provides. To encourage an interdisciplinary education, I follow the work of previous Barn managers, Adrian Centeno and Alyssa Glenn. I started to use digital resources to make information more accessible to the students, and assigned a self-assessment to allow students to critically assess their own learning practices. After implementing these changes, I created a questionnaire to learn whether or not the students themselves found value to these changes and to Barnstorm as a whole. Upon analyzing the student responses, I conclude that my efforts were effective in promoting an interdisciplinary education and helping students realize the potential of Barnstorm.