How I Built Belonging: with Kim Foulds and Scott Cameron
Taylor Steelman in conversation with Sesame Workshop’s Kim Foulds and Scott Cameron
Kim Foulds is Vice President of Content Research and Evaluation at Sesame Workshop overseeing educational impact research on a global basis; Scott Cameron is Head of International Production. Sesame Workshop, the non-profit behind Sesame Street, is a community of 400+ people who provide almost two hundred million children with access to life-changing early education, critical health lessons, helpful tools for tough situations, and importantly, joy. As part of our How I Built Belonging interview series, Kim and Scott talk to ReD’s Taylor Steelman about the educational benefits of belonging, balancing culturally specific and culturally agnostic content, and why Muppets are the perfect tools for learning.
Taylor Steelman Sesame Workshop defines itself as a community where “creators, educators, partners and beloved characters come together to help kids grow smarter, stronger, and kinder”. How do people know when they are a part of this community? Are there specific moments or signals?
Kim Foulds We approach community by acknowledging no single definition for what community looks like; it takes on many different shapes. What we focus on from a research point of view is that a sense of community first starts with a sense of self. For children to develop empathy and to see that there is a community that they belong to, they first have to understand these concepts in themselves. That includes developing content that helps children understand that everyone is important and special, and so all children are able to say what makes me special is X, Y, Z. We support children’s understanding and appreciation of all the different ways people show up. But when we talk about community for young kids, we are really grounded in family. When you start talking about bigger, more abstract concepts like community, which isn’t always a tangible thing, it’s really tough for preschoolers. So, you have to ground community in family and again, family can mean lots of different things, right? Chosen family, biological family, all the different shapes that family can take. That’s where we ground the lessons, that you are already part of something because you belong, you are special, you are enough.
Scott Cameron Part of the work is in teasing out what "belonging” to a given group means to adults and what it means to children. Concretely, for kids that means bringing it down to things like food, songs, dances, holidays, even things like pride or sense of self. Family is always relevant, too. Sometimes we find that to an adult it doesn’t feel like it’s enough to say we’re going to celebrate a particular food – for example, a shared love of hummus, which we focused on many years ago among Palestinian children and Israeli children. To adults, talking about hummus almost seemed too silly or too banal because it’s so basic to daily life in both of those groups of people, but when adults saw how effective it was to focus on basics, it made light bulbs go off.
Kim We talk about windows and mirrors a lot and I think that really relates to community. Children may have not had a ton of exposure to groups who eat different foods, practice different cultural traditions, and so on. So we focus on grounding it in what they know, and then, through media, exposing them to community and connecting their norms and traditions to others’ norms and traditions that they may not otherwise have had exposure to.
“We really strive to make sure that a child, no matter where they come from, what their cultural, religious, ethnic, or racial background is, sees themselves in Muppets.”
Taylor Let’s talk about specific mechanisms that you can wield to create belonging. What does a Muppet do to create belonging that maybe a real person can’t?
Scott What a Muppet can do is remove certain cultural signifiers or specifics. Our “monster” Muppets – for example, Cookie Monster, Elmo, and Basma and Jad in our Ahlan Simsim project – generally don’t wear clothes. They don’t have hairstyles that are really specifically human in the same way that Bert and Ernie might, who are called “humanoid” characters. When you start adding any removable or changeable element, whether it’s clothing, a hairstyle or accessories , you inevitably are adding cultural signifiers that can help people feel like they belong – because they’re seeing clothes that they themselves wear or are familiar in their community – but you also are risking making kids feel distanced from that character. Because our Sesame Muppets have strong personalities and are relatable and quirky, they still invite children in to relate to them and feel connected to them.
Kim When we’re creating a new Muppet or introducing an existing Muppet into a new context, we want to understand if the conditions are right for kids to develop these parasocial relationships. For example when you watch a TV show and you think that you’re friends with people on your favorite TV show, that is so powerful. We work to provide research insights to support that kind of relationship between our preschool viewers and our Muppets. Which means that it is important that the monster Muppets are from everywhere and from nowhere.That provides entry points for all children to see themselves in them, to connect to some aspect of their personality. We really strive to make sure that a child, no matter where they come from, what their cultural, religious, ethnic, or racial background is, sees themselves in Muppets. When Scott and his team are designing new Muppets like Basma and Jad in the Middle East, we test them with kids. How old do you think Basma is? How old do you think Jad is? Do they go to school? Do they live in a house like yours or is it different? These are the important ways that we test for it, and thinking about our work with displaced families, it is so critical that a child can see themselves in our content, especially if they face displacement, if they face learning disruptions, because that is the first step to impact is. That drives engagement, and through engagement, we can support learning.
Scott And sometimes the flip side takes precedent. Thinking about the twin Muppets that we developed for the Rohingya initiative, there were a few factors that drove us to make those characters into humanoid Muppets rather than monsters. A big one was that there had never been children’s media for Rohingya children that we were aware of, so it was important to have Rohingya children be able to see themselves reflected on screen. That felt like a powerful way to boost on-screen representation. We designed humanoid characters for them with specific clothing and hairstyles. Kim has some great stories of being in Bangladesh and doing formative testing with kids and having them hold up pictures …
Kim … and a girl we showed them to looked exactly like one of the designs. It was really incredible, seeing the power of representation. That was one of the best moments of my professional life. We want kids to see themselves in our content and to see a child literally holding a Muppet design that looks exactly like them, it was really a powerful moment. Going back to the parasocial relationships piece, the kind of Muppet is often driven by the kinds of impact we want to have. There are instances, like the one Scott just described, where humanoid Muppets best support engagement and ultimately impact. That kind of creative decision is decided through extensive discussion and partnership between my team with Scott’s team and our education colleagues.
Taylor What do kids get from this type of belonging? What are the benefits?
Kim We know from the literature that belonging is intrinsically connected to all of the other learning domains. Even though belonging is important on its own, it’s connected to all of these other critical child development domains. We know from research that children do see identity differences and make meaning of those differences from a very early age. The preschool years are critical to prevent the onset of bias and prejudice by providing environments that support a sense of belonging for every child. Having a healthy positive identity is critical for children’s development, particularly social and emotional development. Having a positive sense of pride in who you are can also be a protective factor in the face of discrimination and other adverse experiences.
Scott The more we can help children feel confident that they belong in a particular space where there’s learning and sharing and discovery happening, the better primed they are to be more task-persistent. The more that they feel like they belong, the more potential we have to help them stay in the game and not lose confidence. The learning journey for each child requires learning from mistakes and failures and then getting back up and trying again. But not every child responds to challenges in the same way – and that’s where character design comes in. We design our casts of characters so that, collectively, they represent different learning mindsets and different approaches to situations, along with different personalities and traits. That all makes for more compelling stories, because the characters are going to experience conflict as they all try out their different approaches to problems. Basma and Jad are the perfect example of that; they’re a classic odd couple. Basma and Jad have very different approaches to how they engage with life. Jad is a planner. He likes to be organised, he likes to think things through. Basma, on the other hand, instinctively dives in and starts trying things. She’s much less meticulous, which can get messy, but she’s more willing to try things and fail than Jad. So, when they're trying to do something together, there’s a built-in tension that feels really relatable.
“We design our casts of characters so that, collectively, they represent different learning mindsets and different approaches to situations, along with different personalities and traits.”
Taylor You’ve mentioned there’s this ability for Muppets to be especially relatable for children. Do you have thoughts or theories about an availability to belonging among kids that might differ with adults? Sesame Street is in 190 countries across the world. Of course you customise and you tailor to the local environment. But you are able to find that connection to children using a single core model. I’m curious, how much does that have to do with the model and how much is to do with just kids and what they’re receptive to?
Kim I think it does speak to the Sesame Workshop model. There are fundamentals we’ve learned over 53 years about what works for kids’ media, for engagement and learning. That guides the process. We want to make sure that for kids to see themselves, the context and the storylines have to be relatable and easily digestible, and that content is fun and engaging. The question then is how do you make relatable content within all of these diverse contexts? And that’s really where we rely on our research process and get ideas directly from parents and kids, and we share those with the creative and education teams. We don’t make any assumptions about what is relevant, relatable, or appealing to different contexts. When we ask kids and parents in our needs assessments questions that help us better understand a community and also inform the creative and curriculum process. These questions include things like what is your favorite game to play? Who do you like to play with? What kinds of stories, songs, and cultural traditions are important to your family? What is the best part about being a parent? What is the most challenging part of being a parent? What role models do you want your child to look up to? These kinds of questions provide the insights that allow us to make recommendations to drive receptivity.
Scott There are so many inherent contradictions in Sesame Street that are helpful to remember for this. For example, I grew up in Southern California but when I watched Sesame Street as a kid, I saw a New York street with stoops and brownstones. This was less relatable to me – in terms of the kinds of trees, the weather, the style of homes – than parts of South Africa or Jordan would have been. But the way the Sesame characters interacted – the way everyone was welcome – felt fun and safe to me. I felt like, “Oh, I can be friends with the people in this neighbourhood.” We made an episode in season one of Ahlan Simsim, our Middle East production, where some writers wanted to have snow fall in the neighborhood, even though many children in that region had never seen snow. So we were asking, should we even show snow? But the snow stories that we’ve done have proven to be some of the most engaging or highest scoring episodes. It’s not always about being totally relatable to a child’s lived experience, but there has to be enough familiarity and fun and sense of belonging in other elements. In these particular stories, Basma and Jad were the ones experiencing the snow; the viewer is on a journey with them as they’re discovering snow for the first time. They’re the viewer’s proxy, their way into learning something new.
“In any given culture, there’s never one hundred percent agreement on what ‘belonging’ means.”
Taylor What would you like to learn about belonging? What questions do you have that may be valuable for informing what you do?
Kim I think for belonging, as we’ve talked about, the questions are still focused on better understanding diverse identities and how we can best support children’s understanding of their identity. It’s something that we continue to navigate, particularly as we work with children affected by crisis and displacement. We want to support both children who have been displaced as well as children in the host community, because that supports a more collective sense of belonging.
Scott We’re in many different cultures around the world, including the U.S., where there isn’t agreement within the society about which identities are “okay” and which aren’t. And this often leads to violence; people don’t feel safe asserting their identity with pride because, sometimes, they can be killed or their families can be put in danger – the implications are really serious. So, in any given culture, there’s never one hundred percent agreement on what “belonging” means. Recently we did a segment about a cultural dance that had its roots in a particular military history and had then been distorted by outside groups. So, that dance, which seems on the surface like a simple and beautiful tradition, means very different things to different people within the same culture. And so the questions we’re asking ourselves are: do we try to stay away from those kinds of things, even though they’re a really important cultural element that people take great pride in?
Kim The more work we do in this space, the better our questions get about how to make impactful content for kids.
Taylor Steelman is a senior manager at ReD.