Tag Archives: joan ganz cooney

Years ago, when I was a lowly graduate research intern crunching data in Sesame Workshop’s content research department, I saw firsthand the great care with which the organization created high-quality educational media for kids. My journey into education research started just as the internet arrived in NYC public schools, which kicked off an exciting movement that was mobilized by all kinds of new activity to make it possible to connect every school to each other and to the world beyond.…

Lloyd Morrisett (November 2, 1929 – January 15, 2023) was the co-founder of Sesame Street and Children’s Television Workshop, and a founding board member of both the Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. It is hard to overstate the value of his clear vision, his wise leadership, and his enduring impact on children and families, public media, and society at large. Today we honor him by inviting individuals who knew him well or worked with him to share a…

Like many of you, we’ve been thinking a lot about the future. What do we want to take with us from the time before the coronavirus? What’s best left in the past? How do we want to live as we stagger, sore-armed, back into society? If we’ve learned anything from the past year, it’s that collaboration carried us through. Working together is what kept kids learning when the pandemic sent them home. It’s what developed vaccines faster than ever before.…

You may have heard that television programming in the 1960s was called a “vast wasteland.” by then-FCC Chairman Newton Minow. From the beginning, Lloyd Morrisett and I were both convinced that television – which was capturing the attention of children as nothing else was – did have the power to educate as well as to entertain and we set out to prove it. It was back in 1966 when I wrote my original report, The Potential Uses of Television in…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop is thrilled to present a newly reformatted version of Sesame Street co-founder Joan Ganz Cooney’s still-relevant 1966 report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The Potential Uses of Television for Preschool Education made a convincing case for the power of television to prepare children, particularly in underserved communities, to succeed in kindergarten—and led directly to the program that revolutionized children’s media. We have reformatted the original photocopied report because we know today’s researchers, educators,…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center mourns the passing of Peter G. Peterson, an extraordinary international business and civic leader who was a founder and long-time supporter of the Center. Pete and his wife Joan Ganz Cooney have left an indelible imprint on the world through their contributions. He will be greatly missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with Joan and her family during this time. Learn more about Pete’s legacy in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Attention all designers, developers, and researchers: Almost 50 years ago, Joan Ganz Cooney submitted a proposal to the Carnegie Corporation that led to the creation of Sesame Street. Inspired by a conversation with Lloyd Morrisett about how children were so captivated by television that they were effortlessly learning advertising jingles, she conducted interviews with cognitive psychologists, preschool educators, television producers, and filmmakers to explore how this new medium could be harnessed to help young children learn to read and write.…

Welcome 2017!  For the Joan Ganz Cooney Center team, this is a very special year.  In December, we will celebrate our tenth year as an organization dedicated to advancing learning for children in the digital age. For those who follow our work closely, you will recall our first report—an analysis of the rapidly evolving digital landscape of educational toys, software and games called D is for Digital which found that the marketplace was full of products that may have had…

Forty five years ago today, the first episode of Sesame Street aired on PBS. As we celebrate the many ways that our friends Grover, Big Bird, and the rest of the gang have changed the landscape of children’s media for so many generations, all of us at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center would like to salute our founder, the woman whose dedication and determination has made such a tremendous impact on the lives of children all over the world. From…

Last night, Joan Ganz Cooney was honored at Sesame Workshop’s Annual Gala.  This is the first time that Joan, who co-founded the Children’s Television Workshop 45 years ago and remains Chair of the Workshop’s Executive Committee, was honored by her colleagues.  It won’t be the last honor conferred—though Joan, who is incredibly modest given the revolutionary contributions she has made—might prefer less pomp and circumstance as she looks back at her unprecedented impact in the children’s media space.  At the…