B.I.T.

Springing from the departmental support and original grant-writing skills of Chair Shannon Jackson (TDPS), the team of Maria Lucero Padilla (Campus Climate & Compliance), Michael Mansfield (TDPS – Acting Lecturer and Theater Director), Edith Ng (Staff EEOCO), and Carla Trujillo (Graduate Diversity Program), became the original founding co-directors of the Interactive Theater Program.  Beginning in Spring of 2008, Theater 166 – Interactive Theater: Acting for Social Change allowed all UCB community members to engage in the Interactive Theater Program, creating a campus theater company offering 8-10 campus-wide or system-wide workshop diversity programs each semester without charge. Each semester 20-40 community members trained in theater as an educational tool in the service of social justice. The Interactive Theater Program was able to deliver workshops to hundreds of UC community members each semester, creating theater pieces that addressed faculty, staff, and student social justice concerns through an educational workshop model and/or certificate training. During this founding period, we also were able to create and meet with an Advisory Board from constituencies across the campus to help us seek institutional stability beyond the BILD grants. Staff member Evelyn Luluquisen joined our team in 2008 as our support services coordinator (as well as an actor-educator) to help organize the workshops and traveling troupe logistics across campus. In 2009, staff member Breidi Truscott expanded her role from actor-educator to joining the team in this coordinator role.

 

Having taught the ITP course and delivered workshops for 5 semesters, the continuity of the programming created on-going requests from the campus for year-round workshops. In the academic year of 2010-2011, ITP received new funding through the Haas Multicultural Education Grant, allowing us to continue the Interactive Theater course for another year, to continue serving the campus community and UC system, and to continue seeking long-term institutional commitment to this diversity education work.  Workshops per semester increased to 12-14. Maria Lucero Padilla and Michael Mansfield became co-directors during this new grant period. Edith Ng retired from her job at UCB while Carla Trujillo’s increased job responsibilities prevented her from staying fully involved in ITP.  The project remained housed within The Office of the Vice Chancellor of Equity and Inclusion’s Staff Diversity Initiatives. We continue to work closely with the Director of Staff Diversity Initiatives, Dr. Sidalia Reel and Vice Chancellor Gibor Basri.

 

Our goal has always been to establish a self-sustaining theater company living within an on-going academic course to provide workshops without cost to campus communities while contributing to the life-long education of all members of the university in the complex arenas of race, class, sexuality, ability, and status. For the first 3 and ½ years, the company’s work resided within an on-going academic course available to undergraduate and graduate students, staff, faculty, administration, and alumni, using a service-learning and change-agent education model. ITP was cited in the UCB Campus Climate Survey Report 2010 as a valuable and viable resource for the campus community to use to meet diversity education needs effectively in the 21st century.

 

Interactive Theater Company

 

Since Summer of 2011, ITP has continued to secure grant opportunities and paid requests to serve the campus in a variety of forms. While the work no longer had an academic course home, we continued to do the work as a paid theater company while promoting the work, building relationships, and seeking additional funding in hopes to re-institute the course. Without a community of trained diversity education actors in a course to draw from, we now needed to pay students and alumni actors for their work outside of the classroom. Thus was born the Interactive Theater Company. It was at this time Maria and Michael invited Louel Señores, one of our longtime actor-educators and talented writers, to join our creative team more formally to collaborate with us in script development and workshop presentations.

 

We have actively provided programming aimed at addressing current salient and trending staff and student issues customized to the audience participants. For example, in response to campus climate issues raised in campus surveys we initiated and presented Workplace Civility Programs to address staff bullying and workplace violence prevention concerns, as well as, model Multi-Generational Workforce Effectiveness. Additionally, several staff programs were designed as skill development workshops for Student Affairs professional staff. As home to the Disability Movement, we have routinely presented tailored programs to both student and staff groups. The Interactive Theater Company has also been used to meet campus Title IX compliance education for AB 185 Sexual Harassment Prevention Education biennial requirements for Faculty and Managers. Student-focused programs cut across a gamut of diversity education topics and issues being used in student development theory and leadership trainings and are delivered in Residence Halls and Student-Staff Trainings. Concurrently, we train staff and peers in diversity education facilitation for follow up in-service education programs.

 

The Advisory Board was never fully activated in the midst of the actual work being done by the now Interactive Theater Company, especially when the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Equity and Inclusion’s request for the course’s future funding during a belt-tightening period of UC history became less likely. Yet, we continue to communicate with former Advisory Board members and receive their support in the form of references and campus contacts.

 

Colleges, departments, units, and individual faculty across campus have hired us to do trainings for graduate students, undergraduate students, staffs, and faculties. Each time, the ITC process of research, scriptwriting, collaboration, and mentoring with the requesting community is activated, as we co-create anew the facilitation, scenario, and workshop designs in response to the specific needs of the audience. Haas School of Business, University Health Services TANG Center, College of Environmental Design, Department of Psychology, and School of Public Health are recent colleagues in our work.

 

A campus-wide annual advisor training, STAY DAY, has invited us to keynote for all 6 years of its existence, based on the advisors’ evaluations each year citing ITC as the most important aspect of the training day. We were awarded a Department of Justice (DOJ) Grant for Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Education to help train some of the 9000 new incoming undergraduate and graduate students in the summer and fall of 2012 with 6 EmpowerU Trainings. We were then invited to work with all of the fraternities and sororities on this same topic. In 2009, we were tasked with the Race Project Educational Events and Workshops in conjunction with the museum installation on Race at Lawrence Hall of Science. Additionally, we have presented at system-wide conferences hosted at UC Santa Cruz, UC San Francisco, and UC Berkeley for administrator, staff cultural communities, and a variety of student conferences. At this point, we’ve delivered over 100 uniquely designed workshops and educational events using Interactive Theater to train thousands of people in diversity awareness and multicultural skill-building.

 

Alongside the ITC workshops, ITC has developed new relationships with 3 other departments on campus to use interactive theater in new ways in education, being awarded Curriculum Innovation Grants each year. Now in our 5th year, ITC has provided the UCSF/UCB Joint Medical Program in the School of Public Health with “standardized patient” actors to train the medical students. For 4 years, ITC has provided the Department of Nutritional Science and Toxicology with “client” actors to train the nutrition students. Currently, 2 departments are mid-process in submitting Curriculum Innovation Grants with ITC for new projects involving filming “doctor-patient” interactions for the UCSF/UCB Joint Medical Program, as well as, filming “health-education” short stories for Haas Business School for use on youtube in developing nations.