Educational goals of Sesame Street
Encyclopedia
The children's television show Sesame Street
, which premiered on public broadcasting
television stations in 1969, was the first show of its kind that utilized a detailed and comprehensive educational curriculum, with specific educational goals, in its content. Its goals were garnered from formative and summative research, and its first curriculum was created in a series of five seminars in 1968.
Sesame Street has both cognitive and affective goals. Initially, its producers and researchers focused on cognitive goals, while addressing affective goals indirectly, because they believed that focusing on cognitive goals would increase children's self-esteem and feelings of competency. One of their initial and primary goals was preparing young children for school, especially children from low-income families. The show's producers used modeling, repetition, and humor to fulfill their goals. They made changes in the show's contents to increase their viewers' attention and to increase its appeal. They encouraged "co-viewing" to entice older children and parents to watch the show by including humor, cultural references, and celebrities.
After Sesame Street's first season, its critics forced its producers and researchers to address affective goals more overtly. The affective goals they addressed were social competence, tolerance of diversity, and nonaggressive ways of resolving conflict, which was depicted through interpersonal disputes among its residents. In the 1980s, the show used the real-life experiences of the show's cast and crew, such as the death of Will Lee
(Mr. Hooper
) and the pregnancy of Sonia Manzano
(Maria) to address affective concerns. In later seasons, Sesame Street addressed real-life disasters such as the September 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina
.
The show's goals for outreach were addressed through a series of programs that first focused on promotion, and then after the first season, on the development of educational materials used in preschool settings. Innovative programs were developed because their target audience, children and their families in low-income, inner-city homes, did not traditionally watch educational programs on television and because traditional methods of promotion and advertising were not effective with these groups.
has stated, "Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them". Gerald S. Lesser
, the first chair of the Children's Television Workshop's advisory board, stated that the effective use of television as an educational tool needed to capture, focus, and sustain children's attention. Sesame Street was the first children's show that structured each episode and made, as Gladwell put it, "small but critical adjustments" to each segment to capture children's attention.
According to CTW researchers Rosemarie Truglio and Shalom Fisch, Sesame Street was one of the few children's television programs that utilized a detailed and comprehensive educational curriculum, with specific educational goals, in its content. The show's goals were garnered from formative and summative research. The first curriculum was created in a series of five seminars, led by Lesser and attended by Sesame Street's new creative staff and by educational and child development specialists, in 1968. The seminars' participants generated long lists of goals, which the Workshop organized into five categories. Eventually, these categories were whittled down to four: symbolic representation, cognitive processes, the physical environment, and the social environment. At first, the goals were stated from the child's perspective, but eventually they were restated to reflect the writers' perspective.
As Lesser stated, Sesame Street's creators recognized that television lent itself well to the use of modelling
as a teaching tool. They understood that children tended to imitate what they saw on the screen, so many writing and production methods were used to directly model effective verbal communication. Indirect modeling, without explicit labeling, was used to demonstrate positive behaviors as well. One of the positive behaviors they modeled was inquisitiveness and the enjoyment of learning. If humor, for example, interfered with the intended instructional message or exhibited inappropriate behavior, it was removed. As Muppet performer Fran Brill
explained, the show's puppeteers demonstrated emotions by banging their puppets' heads against the wall or by having them fall backwards, but when research found that these behaviors did not demonstrate good models of appropriate behavior, these behaviors were changed. The Muppet Roosevelt Franklin
, for example, was removed from the show because many leaders in the African American community felt that he displayed negative cultural stereotypes.
The creators of Sesame Street believed that young children were easily distracted by peripheral details and were unable to selectively attend to the most useful aspects of what they observed, so they gave special care to, as Lesser put it, "make salient what the child is expected to learn". They eliminated irrelevant and distracting content without making the content uninteresting, especially in repeated viewings. The content they presented had to compete with the distractions that occurred as a result of viewing at home, so they realized that the show had to have high appeal. They found, however, that the relationship between appeal and comprehension was more complicated than they initially thought, and discovered that young children probably did not attend to material that was presented at a higher level than they were ready to understand. The workshop's researchers found that by crafting the show's segments, children's verbal participation and interaction could be increased, which addressed their critics' concerns about children's passivity while watching television.
Repetition was a convention used often on Sesame Street. The creators understood that repetition gave young children opportunities to practice new skills and assisted them in making a connection between new and unfamiliar concepts. As Lesser stated, they observed that children seemed to enjoy some material more after viewing them several times, and allowed them to predict and anticipate the outcome of a sequence. Repetition made it easier to teach complex concepts or situations a child would not be able to comprehend from a single viewing, and allowed children to explore different facets of a subject. In the early years of Sesame Street, the producers took advantage of repetition as an effective teaching tool by often repeating the same segment many times during the course of an episode; in the first ten seasons, one in six segments was a repeat of an earlier one. The workshop also learned that varying the details while repeating the same format was also an effective use of repetition.
Television historian Robert W. Morrow saw what he called "the often repeated alphabet recitation segment" as an example of the show's use of repetition. For example, in a short film in which actor James Earl Jones
recited the alphabet, Jones made long pauses before each letter, which were superimposed in a corner of the screen moments before he said it. According to Cooney, some educational advisors recommended against using Jones, thinking that he would frighten young viewers, but children ended up loving his segments. The producers found that children who had seen the segment a few times said the letter before Jones did, and Jones often served as confirmation or correction. The producers viewed this as a way to make television more interactive, and dubbed it "the James Earl Jones effect".
Humor was used on Sesame Street to both attract the attention of its young viewers and to, as Lesser put it, "entice parents and older siblings to share the young child's viewing", called "coviewing" by Truglio and Fisch. Lesser went so far as to state that educational television was "completely dependent upon the effective use of humor". Lesser also stated that in order for comedy to be an effective teaching tool, it had to coincide with the lesson being taught. Although critics complained that slapstick
was too violent for children's television, the Workshop found that it was the most effective comedy form they used, and as Lesser said, "a favorite with preschoolers". Morrow reported that the only violence depicted on Sesame Street was "slapstick punctuation", and that it was used only in animations and short films.
Another way the Workshop encouraged co-viewing was through the use of cultural references that only adults would understand. According to Davis, Jim Henson was instrumental in creating the show's "two-tiered audience". Celebrities familiar to adults and older children also appeared on the show. According to writer Louise A. Gikow, Cooney's previous documentary production experience and producer Dave Connell's "wide ranging contacts in the media" resulted in successful bookings of celebrities on the show, even before the show became successful. As of 2009, over 500 celebrities had appeared on Sesame Street.
According to Davis, Sesame Street's curriculum began addressing affective goals more overtly during the 1980s, when as he put it, the show focused on "turning inward, expanding its young viewers' world". Davis reported that their affective goals were inspired by the experiences of its writing staff, cast, and crew. For example, in one of the show's landmarks, the producers addressed grief after the 1982 death of Will Lee
, who had played Mr. Hooper
since the show's premiere.For a description of this episode, see Borgenicht, p. 42, and Davis, pp. 281-285.
For the 1988 and 1989 seasons, the topics of love, marriage, and childbirth were addressed when they created a storyline in which the characters Luis and Maria fall in love, marry, and have a child, Gabi. Sonia Manzano
, the actress who played Maria, had married and become pregnant; according to the book Sesame Street Unpaved, published after the show's thirtieth anniversary in 1999, Manzano's real-life experiences gave the show's writers and producers the idea. Research was done before any scripts were written to gain an understanding of the previous studies about preschoolers' understanding of love, marriage, and family. The show's research staff found that at the time, there was very little relevant research done about children's understanding of these topics, and no books for children had been written about them. Studies done after the episodes about Maria's pregnancy aired showed that as a result of watching these episodes, children's understanding of pregnancy increased.See Truglio et al., pp. 74-76, for a more detailed discussion. Also see Hellman, p. 53 and Davis, pp. 293-294, for a description of the wedding episode, written by Jeff Moss, and Borgenicht, pp. 80-81, for descriptions of the wedding and of Gabi's birth.
According to Gikow, another way Sesame Street addressed affective goals was by addressing real-life disasters. For example, the producers addressed the September 11 terrorist attacks with an episode that aired in early 2002. They also produced a series of four episodes that aired after Hurricane Katrina
in 2005. These episodes were used in Sesame Workshop's Community Outreach program.
Gikow called writer Emily Perl Kingsley an "expert" at interpreting the show's curriculum goals surrounding tolerance, diversity, and inclusion, especially as it related to the disability community. Kingsley has been a leader in the Workshop for ensuring that people with disabilities were included in the show. For example, she hired the Little Theater of the Deaf to appear on Sesame Street, and was instrumental in the addition of Deaf actress Linda Bove
to its cast. Kingsley's son Jason, who had Down's Syndrome, also appeared several times on the show. As Kingsley reported, "...Sesame Street has a better record than any other show in the history of television of doing this on a regular basis in a comfortable kind of way".
The Workshop devoted 8% of their initial budget to advertise the new show. In what Morrow called "an extensive campaign", they promoted the show with educators and the broadcast industry. The Workshop understood that a special effort had to be made to reach their target community because traditional methods of promotion and advertising were not effective with these groups. To get the word out to their target audience in the inner cities, they hired Evelyn Davis from the Urban League, whom Michael Davis called "remarkable, unsinkable, and indispensable", as the Workshop's first Vice President of Community Relations and head of the Workshop's Community Educational Services (CES) division.
After Sesame Street's popularity became established after its first season, the CES' outreach efforts turned from promotion to the development of educational materials used in preschool settings. As Yotive and Fisch reported, the child-care community eventually became the CES' "core constituency". Early outreach efforts included mobile viewing units that broadcast the show in the inner cities, in Appalachia
, in Native American
communities, and in migrant worker camps. In the early 1980s, the CES developed into the Sesame Street Preschool Education Program (PEP), whose goal was to assist preschools, by combining television viewing, books, hands-on activities, and other media, in using the show as an educational resource.
The Workshop's outreach programs included providing materials to non-English speaking children and adults. Instead of following the traditional practice of translating their English materials into Spanish, for example, they employed what they called "versioning", or creating parallel sets of materials that conveyed the same content and messages in culturally and linguistically relevant ways. Starting in 2006, the Workshop expanded its outreach by creating a series of PBS specials and DVDs focusing on how military deployment affects the families of soldiers. The Workshop's outreach efforts also focused on families of prisoners, health and wellness, and safety.
Sesame Street
Sesame Street has undergone significant changes in its history. According to writer Michael Davis, by the mid-1970s the show had become "an American institution". The cast and crew expanded during this time, including the hiring of women in the crew and additional minorities in the cast. The...
, which premiered on public broadcasting
Public broadcasting
Public broadcasting includes radio, television and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service. Public broadcasters receive funding from diverse sources including license fees, individual contributions, public financing and commercial financing.Public broadcasting may be...
television stations in 1969, was the first show of its kind that utilized a detailed and comprehensive educational curriculum, with specific educational goals, in its content. Its goals were garnered from formative and summative research, and its first curriculum was created in a series of five seminars in 1968.
Sesame Street has both cognitive and affective goals. Initially, its producers and researchers focused on cognitive goals, while addressing affective goals indirectly, because they believed that focusing on cognitive goals would increase children's self-esteem and feelings of competency. One of their initial and primary goals was preparing young children for school, especially children from low-income families. The show's producers used modeling, repetition, and humor to fulfill their goals. They made changes in the show's contents to increase their viewers' attention and to increase its appeal. They encouraged "co-viewing" to entice older children and parents to watch the show by including humor, cultural references, and celebrities.
After Sesame Street's first season, its critics forced its producers and researchers to address affective goals more overtly. The affective goals they addressed were social competence, tolerance of diversity, and nonaggressive ways of resolving conflict, which was depicted through interpersonal disputes among its residents. In the 1980s, the show used the real-life experiences of the show's cast and crew, such as the death of Will Lee
Will Lee
Will Lee was an American actor best known for playing the store proprietor Mr. Hooper on Sesame Street, from the show's debut in 1969 until his death in 1982.-Early career:...
(Mr. Hooper
Mr. Hooper
Harold Hooper was a character on Sesame Street, played by Will Lee, who was the original proprietor of Mr. Hooper's Store, which still retains his name.-Biography:...
) and the pregnancy of Sonia Manzano
Sonia Manzano
Sonia Manzano is an American actress and writer. She is best known for playing Maria on Sesame Street since 1971. She also licenses her image to promote items of baby clothes and plates in Hispanic America....
(Maria) to address affective concerns. In later seasons, Sesame Street addressed real-life disasters such as the September 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...
.
The show's goals for outreach were addressed through a series of programs that first focused on promotion, and then after the first season, on the development of educational materials used in preschool settings. Innovative programs were developed because their target audience, children and their families in low-income, inner-city homes, did not traditionally watch educational programs on television and because traditional methods of promotion and advertising were not effective with these groups.
Purpose of goals
As author Malcolm GladwellMalcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell, CM is a Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He is currently based in New York City and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996...
has stated, "Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them". Gerald S. Lesser
Gerald S. Lesser
Gerald Samuel Lesser was an American psychologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University and was one of the chief advisers to the Children's Television Workshop in the development and content of the educational programming included in Sesame Street, with the goal of making the material...
, the first chair of the Children's Television Workshop's advisory board, stated that the effective use of television as an educational tool needed to capture, focus, and sustain children's attention. Sesame Street was the first children's show that structured each episode and made, as Gladwell put it, "small but critical adjustments" to each segment to capture children's attention.
According to CTW researchers Rosemarie Truglio and Shalom Fisch, Sesame Street was one of the few children's television programs that utilized a detailed and comprehensive educational curriculum, with specific educational goals, in its content. The show's goals were garnered from formative and summative research. The first curriculum was created in a series of five seminars, led by Lesser and attended by Sesame Street's new creative staff and by educational and child development specialists, in 1968. The seminars' participants generated long lists of goals, which the Workshop organized into five categories. Eventually, these categories were whittled down to four: symbolic representation, cognitive processes, the physical environment, and the social environment. At first, the goals were stated from the child's perspective, but eventually they were restated to reflect the writers' perspective.
Cognitive goals
Lesser reported in his 1974 book, Children and Television: Lessons Learned From Sesame Street, written to document the development of the show and the CTW, that one of the goals of the show's creators was "the fundamental purpose of preparing children for school". They were aware, as Lesser stated, of the "individual suffering and frustration" of the child who was ill-prepared for the demands of school, so they sought to instill in their young viewers an appetite for learning. Two related goals were providing their viewers with basic educational skills, which Lesser insisted was valuable to inner-city parents, and teaching children both what and how to think. The show's creators decided to only include in their curriculum the range of skills of the three-to-five year old child, and not focus on skills they already had, or on skills beyond their reach.As Lesser stated, Sesame Street's creators recognized that television lent itself well to the use of modelling
Modelling (psychology)
Modelling or modeling in psychology is:# a method used in certain techniques of psychotherapy whereby the client learns by imitation alone, without any specific verbal direction by the therapist and...
as a teaching tool. They understood that children tended to imitate what they saw on the screen, so many writing and production methods were used to directly model effective verbal communication. Indirect modeling, without explicit labeling, was used to demonstrate positive behaviors as well. One of the positive behaviors they modeled was inquisitiveness and the enjoyment of learning. If humor, for example, interfered with the intended instructional message or exhibited inappropriate behavior, it was removed. As Muppet performer Fran Brill
Fran Brill
Frances Joan "Fran" Brill , is an American actress and puppeteer, best known for her roles on Sesame Street.Brill was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Linette and Joseph M. Brill. Her father was a physician...
explained, the show's puppeteers demonstrated emotions by banging their puppets' heads against the wall or by having them fall backwards, but when research found that these behaviors did not demonstrate good models of appropriate behavior, these behaviors were changed. The Muppet Roosevelt Franklin
Roosevelt Franklin
Roosevelt Franklin was a Muppet featured on the children's television series Sesame Street during the early 1970s. He is purple with shaggy black hair that stands on end. His name is word play on the name of US President Franklin Roosevelt...
, for example, was removed from the show because many leaders in the African American community felt that he displayed negative cultural stereotypes.
The creators of Sesame Street believed that young children were easily distracted by peripheral details and were unable to selectively attend to the most useful aspects of what they observed, so they gave special care to, as Lesser put it, "make salient what the child is expected to learn". They eliminated irrelevant and distracting content without making the content uninteresting, especially in repeated viewings. The content they presented had to compete with the distractions that occurred as a result of viewing at home, so they realized that the show had to have high appeal. They found, however, that the relationship between appeal and comprehension was more complicated than they initially thought, and discovered that young children probably did not attend to material that was presented at a higher level than they were ready to understand. The workshop's researchers found that by crafting the show's segments, children's verbal participation and interaction could be increased, which addressed their critics' concerns about children's passivity while watching television.
Repetition was a convention used often on Sesame Street. The creators understood that repetition gave young children opportunities to practice new skills and assisted them in making a connection between new and unfamiliar concepts. As Lesser stated, they observed that children seemed to enjoy some material more after viewing them several times, and allowed them to predict and anticipate the outcome of a sequence. Repetition made it easier to teach complex concepts or situations a child would not be able to comprehend from a single viewing, and allowed children to explore different facets of a subject. In the early years of Sesame Street, the producers took advantage of repetition as an effective teaching tool by often repeating the same segment many times during the course of an episode; in the first ten seasons, one in six segments was a repeat of an earlier one. The workshop also learned that varying the details while repeating the same format was also an effective use of repetition.
Television historian Robert W. Morrow saw what he called "the often repeated alphabet recitation segment" as an example of the show's use of repetition. For example, in a short film in which actor James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones is an American actor. He is well-known for his distinctive bass voice and for his portrayal of characters of substance, gravitas and leadership...
recited the alphabet, Jones made long pauses before each letter, which were superimposed in a corner of the screen moments before he said it. According to Cooney, some educational advisors recommended against using Jones, thinking that he would frighten young viewers, but children ended up loving his segments. The producers found that children who had seen the segment a few times said the letter before Jones did, and Jones often served as confirmation or correction. The producers viewed this as a way to make television more interactive, and dubbed it "the James Earl Jones effect".
Humor was used on Sesame Street to both attract the attention of its young viewers and to, as Lesser put it, "entice parents and older siblings to share the young child's viewing", called "coviewing" by Truglio and Fisch. Lesser went so far as to state that educational television was "completely dependent upon the effective use of humor". Lesser also stated that in order for comedy to be an effective teaching tool, it had to coincide with the lesson being taught. Although critics complained that slapstick
Slapstick
Slapstick is a type of comedy involving exaggerated violence and activities which may exceed the boundaries of common sense.- Origins :The phrase comes from the batacchio or bataccio — called the 'slap stick' in English — a club-like object composed of two wooden slats used in Commedia dell'arte...
was too violent for children's television, the Workshop found that it was the most effective comedy form they used, and as Lesser said, "a favorite with preschoolers". Morrow reported that the only violence depicted on Sesame Street was "slapstick punctuation", and that it was used only in animations and short films.
Another way the Workshop encouraged co-viewing was through the use of cultural references that only adults would understand. According to Davis, Jim Henson was instrumental in creating the show's "two-tiered audience". Celebrities familiar to adults and older children also appeared on the show. According to writer Louise A. Gikow, Cooney's previous documentary production experience and producer Dave Connell's "wide ranging contacts in the media" resulted in successful bookings of celebrities on the show, even before the show became successful. As of 2009, over 500 celebrities had appeared on Sesame Street.
Affective goals
At first, the creators of Sesame Street addressed what Morrow called "affective goals" indirectly, believing that focusing on cognitive and educational goals would naturally increase children's self-esteem and feelings of competency. Their viewers' racial identities were addressed by integrating the show with, at first, black and white actors and performers. Eventually their critics during the show's first season forced the Workshop to address affective goals more overtly, which occurred after what Morrow called "extensive research and planning". The affective goals they addressed were social competence, tolerance of diversity, and nonaggressive ways of resolving conflict, which was depicted through interpersonal disputes among its residents, making Sesame Street, as Morrow put it, an "idealized place of child empowerment".According to Davis, Sesame Street's curriculum began addressing affective goals more overtly during the 1980s, when as he put it, the show focused on "turning inward, expanding its young viewers' world". Davis reported that their affective goals were inspired by the experiences of its writing staff, cast, and crew. For example, in one of the show's landmarks, the producers addressed grief after the 1982 death of Will Lee
Will Lee
Will Lee was an American actor best known for playing the store proprietor Mr. Hooper on Sesame Street, from the show's debut in 1969 until his death in 1982.-Early career:...
, who had played Mr. Hooper
Mr. Hooper
Harold Hooper was a character on Sesame Street, played by Will Lee, who was the original proprietor of Mr. Hooper's Store, which still retains his name.-Biography:...
since the show's premiere.For a description of this episode, see Borgenicht, p. 42, and Davis, pp. 281-285.
For the 1988 and 1989 seasons, the topics of love, marriage, and childbirth were addressed when they created a storyline in which the characters Luis and Maria fall in love, marry, and have a child, Gabi. Sonia Manzano
Sonia Manzano
Sonia Manzano is an American actress and writer. She is best known for playing Maria on Sesame Street since 1971. She also licenses her image to promote items of baby clothes and plates in Hispanic America....
, the actress who played Maria, had married and become pregnant; according to the book Sesame Street Unpaved, published after the show's thirtieth anniversary in 1999, Manzano's real-life experiences gave the show's writers and producers the idea. Research was done before any scripts were written to gain an understanding of the previous studies about preschoolers' understanding of love, marriage, and family. The show's research staff found that at the time, there was very little relevant research done about children's understanding of these topics, and no books for children had been written about them. Studies done after the episodes about Maria's pregnancy aired showed that as a result of watching these episodes, children's understanding of pregnancy increased.See Truglio et al., pp. 74-76, for a more detailed discussion. Also see Hellman, p. 53 and Davis, pp. 293-294, for a description of the wedding episode, written by Jeff Moss, and Borgenicht, pp. 80-81, for descriptions of the wedding and of Gabi's birth.
According to Gikow, another way Sesame Street addressed affective goals was by addressing real-life disasters. For example, the producers addressed the September 11 terrorist attacks with an episode that aired in early 2002. They also produced a series of four episodes that aired after Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...
in 2005. These episodes were used in Sesame Workshop's Community Outreach program.
Gikow called writer Emily Perl Kingsley an "expert" at interpreting the show's curriculum goals surrounding tolerance, diversity, and inclusion, especially as it related to the disability community. Kingsley has been a leader in the Workshop for ensuring that people with disabilities were included in the show. For example, she hired the Little Theater of the Deaf to appear on Sesame Street, and was instrumental in the addition of Deaf actress Linda Bove
Linda Bove
Linda Bove is a deaf American actress who played the part of Linda the Librarian on the children's television program Sesame Street from 1971 to 2003.-Sesame Street:...
to its cast. Kingsley's son Jason, who had Down's Syndrome, also appeared several times on the show. As Kingsley reported, "...Sesame Street has a better record than any other show in the history of television of doing this on a regular basis in a comfortable kind of way".
Outreach
As Lesser reported, Sesame Street focused on children from disadvantaged backgrounds, but the show's creators recognized that in order to achieve the kind of success they wanted, they needed to encourage all children, no matter what their background, to watch it. At the same time, however, their primary goal was to make the show appealing to inner-city families, a group that did not traditionally watch educational programs on public television. As Lesser stated, "If the series did not work for poor children, the entire project would fail". Morrow called the new show's audience "concentric", with its targeted audience, "the urban poor", within the larger circle of all preschoolers. As a result, the Workshop organized an outreach to inner-city communities, which as Lesser stated, "would demand at least as much ingenuity as production and research".The Workshop devoted 8% of their initial budget to advertise the new show. In what Morrow called "an extensive campaign", they promoted the show with educators and the broadcast industry. The Workshop understood that a special effort had to be made to reach their target community because traditional methods of promotion and advertising were not effective with these groups. To get the word out to their target audience in the inner cities, they hired Evelyn Davis from the Urban League, whom Michael Davis called "remarkable, unsinkable, and indispensable", as the Workshop's first Vice President of Community Relations and head of the Workshop's Community Educational Services (CES) division.
After Sesame Street's popularity became established after its first season, the CES' outreach efforts turned from promotion to the development of educational materials used in preschool settings. As Yotive and Fisch reported, the child-care community eventually became the CES' "core constituency". Early outreach efforts included mobile viewing units that broadcast the show in the inner cities, in Appalachia
Appalachia
Appalachia is a term used to describe a cultural region in the eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York state to northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountain in the U.S...
, in Native American
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
communities, and in migrant worker camps. In the early 1980s, the CES developed into the Sesame Street Preschool Education Program (PEP), whose goal was to assist preschools, by combining television viewing, books, hands-on activities, and other media, in using the show as an educational resource.
The Workshop's outreach programs included providing materials to non-English speaking children and adults. Instead of following the traditional practice of translating their English materials into Spanish, for example, they employed what they called "versioning", or creating parallel sets of materials that conveyed the same content and messages in culturally and linguistically relevant ways. Starting in 2006, the Workshop expanded its outreach by creating a series of PBS specials and DVDs focusing on how military deployment affects the families of soldiers. The Workshop's outreach efforts also focused on families of prisoners, health and wellness, and safety.