The Media & Policy Center has received a significant grant to begin work on America's Family Farmers. Production of the series will begin in the summer of 2008.

Harry Wiland's 1969 film production Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music will be broadcast as part of PBS's P.O.V. series on August 5, 2008. More on Harry's work with Johnny Cash can be found here.

Harry Wiland and Dale Bell have received California Greenworks' Environmental Leaders Award for their "...outstanding work in raising awareness for environmental sustainability through the PBS series Edens Lost & Found."

The first in a series of Edens Lost & Found Town Hall Meetings was held in Philadelphia early in 2008, and was broadcast by WHYY (Philadelphia PBS) in April. More details and excerpts from the broadcast are available here.

Harry Wiland and Dale Bell have been elected Ashoka Fellows and Purpose Prize Fellows.

Harry Wiland and Dale Bell win First and Third Prizes in NAAEE Environmental Film Festival.

Media & Policy Center: Education

Education is considered by Americans to be the single most important long-term issue our country faces. After protecting our borders, public education is the government activity with the single most profound and far-reaching effect on the national character. However, despite all the attention paid to education, attempts to improve our schools and our educational system have generated more questions than answers and more conflict than consensus about teaching, learning, schooling and education.

an excerpt from Which Way American Education?

We are approaching this challenge in two ways. First, we are developing media programs that explore and analyze these issues in depth. For instance, Which Way American Education? will explore and examine lingering and growing questions about K-12 public education in a search for deeper understanding of the issues that face parents, teachers and policymakers today.

In addition, we are moving our own work into the educational domain, by designing curricula around the topics addressed by our media projects. Our first effort in this area is the development of a curriculum -- Going To Green -- that uses materials from our Edens Lost & Found PBS series as the foundation for a 20-unit high school / community college curriculum on sustainabilty and environmental awareness. Through this project and others like it, we hope to inspire new generations of thinkers and doers to take part in our society and work to benefit us all.

Education For Social Action

Going To Green is a high school and community college curriculum built from Edens Lost & Found, our PBS series on sustainability and urban redevelopment. It is the first in a series of curricula that seeks to put what we have learned from our media projects into action.

Which Way American Education?

This project will analyze the relationship between what (and how) we teach our children and who we, as a society, are, and will become. A series of PBS broadcasts will focus on controversial issues in education, with profiles of leading educators, researchers, and thought-leaders used to focus and complement the investigation of these issues.