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The Media & Policy Center has received a significant grant to begin work on America's Family Farmers.

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: Which Way American Education?

In Development

Education is considered by Americans to be the single most important long- term issue our country faces. In fact, reaching back over 30 years to the publication of the Nation at Risk report, issues about the quality of our educational system have persistently dominated the attention of policymakers and the American public. Many people believe that, after protecting our borders, public education is the government activity with the single most profound and far-reaching effect on the national character. Despite all the attention paid to education, however, 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.

Which Way American Education? will be a broadly-targeted, multi-platform project, centered on a PBS television series with an expected audience of millions of viewers. The series will explore and examine questions about K-12 public education in a search for deeper understanding of the issues that face parents, teachers and policymakers today.

The project will feature a series of hour-long, regularly scheduled, primetime PBS broadcasts, each focusing on a single, pressing, controversial issue in education. Profiles of leading educators, researchers and thought-leaders will focus and complement the investigation into these issues. This series will offer possible solutions to educational challenges, but will not advocate any particular point of view. Rather, a neutral "voice" will add context and, when appropriate, challenge the assertions of the experts whose work is featured. The series will analyze the relationship between what (and how) we teach our children and who we, as a society, are — and will become.

The PBS broadcasts will be supported by a nationwide community outreach and publicity campaign, a fully interactive web site, rich in resources that will be integrated into the TV programs, a companion ("as seen on PBS") book and a curriculum of coordinated after-market products, tailored for specific use in various regions across the country.

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