Rocío Almanza Guillén: Reflections on 15 Years of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center

It was December 2013. I was finishing my master’s program in Media Design for Learning at NYU when one of my professors told me about a position at Sesame Workshop that, according to him, had my name all over it. Soon, three more people shared the same position with me, saying it “would be a perfect fit.” The position was for a bilingual qualitative researcher with professional experience working with young children to work on the Families and Media Initiative at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center to explore how Spanish-speaking families were using technology and media for learning alongside a talented group of researchers internally and a group of academics and practitioners across the country. 

In 2002, I had begun my career in Mexican Public Television as a research assistant in the children’s programming block, Once Niños, doing quantitative and qualitative research and conducting dozens of interviews and focus groups with kids between the ages of 3 to 12. I continued to use data and research to inform my work for many more years as I moved into the production of content for children. As you can see, people had a point saying the position sounded like a good fit, but at the time, it was harder than it is now for people to truly see my 12 years of professional experience in children’s media just because that experience was from Mexico. I was skeptical. 

My first interview with my soon-to-be colleagues, Lori Takeuchi, Jason Yip, Brianna Presley, and Anna Ly made all my fears disappear. Not just because our meeting went way over time, but because they seemed like an honest, caring, and incredibly brilliant group that seemed eager to learn (yes, learn) from my own experience; it completely blew my mind and made me feel like a professional again. 

For almost two years, while I was an associate researcher at the Cooney Center, we visited families of different SEL across various boroughs of New York City. We filmed interviews with children and families, and we reviewed material captured by children with flip cameras. We discussed our findings in various groups, such as the Aprendiendo Juntos Council (AJC); we became more curious, and we studied more. We met with researchers, had long and fruitful discussions about families and technology, and questioned how we could influence creators, producers, and designers to serve families and kids better, especially Latinx families that had been overlooked by the industry for so long. 

Once the grant for our project came to an end, I moved to Denver, Colorado, where I live now. I was eager to expand my learning to the school settings, so I worked at a school teaching kids about design, games, and computational thinking; I was able to add a piece of the puzzle after observing bilingual low-income children using technology in various ways at school.  

Fast forward to 2020. I began working at Fred Rogers Productions as a digital producer, first for Alma’s Way and now also for Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, where I get to apply the breadth of learning that I absorbed from my extraordinary experience at the Cooney Center. After seven years, it still informs my perspective and the decisions I make in leading our development partners, and as I strategize on how to serve children better. The valuable insights from the work we did with AJC partners around intergenerational learning and co-playing are always top of mind; I am constantly thinking of the quality and respect that these families deserve in the games, activities, and other content that we create. 

I want to finish this love letter by sharing a memory. One day when I was 5 years old, my mother, a now-retired teacher, brought me to her third-grade classroom. The lesson was about triangles, and when her students couldn’t remember the characteristics of triangles, she brought me to the front of the class and had me say what I knew about the topic. Then she said I had learned these facts from Plaza Sésamo, “so you all need to go home and watch that show after school.” It was my dream to work at Sesame Workshop, and it was an even greater dream come to life to work with what I now call the dream team led by Lori Takeuchi: Brianna Ellerbe, Jason Yip, Kristen Kohm, Anna Ly, Alan Nong, and Michael Levine, Catherine Jhee, Sadaf Sajwani, Lili Toutounas and the rest of the JGCC team. I’ll be forever grateful to the first company that gave me a chance as a recent immigrant in the US with a thick accent, and that keeps opening its doors—and other doors—for me. 

Love, 

Rocio 

 

Rocío Almanza Guillén is a deeply passionate bilingual innovator in the children’s media industry. Her almost-20-years experience includes product management, production, creativity, and strategy for educational and non-profit organizations such as the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, Televisa Foundation, NCWIT, Once TV México, the Denver Zoo, Discovery Kids México as well as in-depth study and collaboration in programs for girls, such as Girls Inc. of Metro Denver, STEMblazers (formerly Girls in STEM), and TECHNOLOchicas. She is currently a digital producer at Fred Rogers Productions.