Featured Program

Palace Production Center, an award-winning Connecticut media company is teaming with Fairfield University Graduate School of Education, CPTV, and a team of top historians from places like Yale University and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to create a breakthrough multi-platform project to help teach history and civics to middle school students.

Called Young American Heroes (YAH), the project is one of only a handful funded last year by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in a national competition that drew 80 entries.

YAH seeks to set up a new paradigm for education...breaking down the walls...going directly to teachers to get their input...and finding students where they live 24/7 on their I-Pods and cell phones...speaking to them in peer based language.

The Young American Heroes series takes a break-the-mold approach to telling the epic story of America's past to middle school students. We will do so by using primary documents and diaries to show ordinary kids doing extraordinary things during seminal moments in American history. This peer approach to historical narrative brings the past to life in a way that is both captivating and informing for the target demographic: young people ages 11-14 in grades 6-9 and their teachers and parents.

Tim Smith: Executive ProducerIf all goes as planned, according to Young American Heroes managing partner Chris Campbell (a South Norwalk resident) and executive producer Tim Smith (a Rowayton resident), YAH will grow into a Connecticut-based media franchise similar to American Girl and the Sesame Street/Creative Television Workshop.

The first program in the series is on the early years of Frederick Douglass, based on his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written by Himself.

Chris Campbell: Managing Partner and Director A Young American Heroes microsite through the link at the bottom of this page has been established with the goal of getting middle school social studies teachers throughout the state involved in the process of developing the Frederick Douglass television program, the Young American Heroes website, and the curriculum and classroom support materials being developed around the program. This in itself is revolutionary, we are told by teachers who have participated in focus groups. Several schools will participate in testing these "pilot program" materials in their classrooms in June 2008. The half-hour TV show is scheduled for broadcast on CPTV in September, 2008, with a national broadcast on public television stations slated for February, 2009, in conjunction with national rollout of Young American Heroes materials to coincide with Black History Month.

Starting in March, through the Young American Heroes website, teachers (and their students) are able to critique the latest draft of the script for the Frederick Douglass TV show, suggest locations and props, even comment on casting decisions and participate in open casting calls for extras. The program is being shot on locations throughout Connecticut this spring by South Norwalk's Palace Production Center/Palace Digital Studios. It will be edited by Palace Digital Studios at its South Norwalk, Conn., television/film studio. YAH-born and produced in our state for a national launch--is one of many productions taking advantage of the Connecticut Tax Credits attracting film projects to the state.

In addition to conducting teacher focus groups with middle schools around the state to get Connecticut teachers involved in the process before materials are finalized, Young American Heroes will be promoting the project during the New England Region Conference on the Social Studies, March 27-28 at the Omni New Haven Hotel.

The content platforms for the Young American Heroes pilot include:

• Television program for public television (1 x 30) for PBS
• Web 2.0 interactive website
• Teacher's website which will contain curriculum and teacher's guide with just-in-time training modules for how to use materials in digital storytelling and other classroom activities,
• Retail DVD
• Graphic novel
• Microsite for teacher/student creative input

In creating our pilot, we are designing the content for each specific platform in advance rather than retrofitting it after producing the television pilot/series-another unusual approach. This strategic content management approach allows us to fully realize the potential of each medium and to maximize the historical content.

Frederick DouglassOur pilot, based on Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written by Himself, will be the first of a five-part series of enthralling, true-life stories of young American heroes and heroines from Colonial America to the Civil War. We hope this series will do for today's middle school students what Star Wars did for science fiction. That's because Young American Heroes shares in common with Star Wars - and with all successful films - the same dramatic elements of good and evil, right and wrong, life and death, and young people taking on and triumphing over adversity. Ours will be compelling tales, well told and focusing exclusively on young people.

Relying on primary historical documents, the series will allow students (and teachers) to experience the Colonial era through the life of 8-year-old Eunice Williams, who became a Native American captive, and then chose to stay with her captors; fight the American Revolution with 16-year-old Sybil Ludington; experience the horrors of slavery and triumph of escape with the teenage Frederick Douglass; travel the Oregon Trail with 13-year-old John Sager; and witness the travails of combat and the Civil War through the eyes of a 15-year-old Union veteran, Elisha Stockwell.