Developing a culturally relevant Sesame Street in the Syrian response region

• In Event: Evidence based and culturally meaningful early childhood development programming and research in the Syrian response context

Proposal

Interventions to strengthen nurturing relationships with caregivers and to provide children with early learning opportunities can serve to protect children, mitigate the impact of negative consequences of war and displacement, and help to address gaps in early learning outcomes. To help address these gaps, Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee have launched a partnership, known as Sesame Seeds, to provide educational support to displaced children and their caregivers in the Syrian response region. The aim of the partnership is to meet children and their families where they are, which, given the depth of TV and smartphone penetration, includes the creation of a new culturally relevant Sesame Street co-production.
Grounded in research at every stage of design, Sesame Workshop’s aim is to locally produce children’s television content that reflects the interests, needs, and culture of its audience. For Sesame Seeds, to ensure that the production of contextually appropriate mass media content for use in television broadcast and digital distribution, we carried out a needs assessment in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, supported with funding from the MacArthur Foundation.
Focused on data needed to inform the creation of a new kids’ TV show, knowing that IRC has an extensive pool of research and experience to draw on to support creation of content for direct services, several key objectives guided the development of the study:
• Learn more about children’s academic and socio-emotional needs
• Understand caregivers’ parenting needs
• Identify and compare caregivers’ and practitioners’ educational priorities for young children
• Learn more about professional needs and challenges of people working directly with young children and their families
Based on interviews conducted individual interviews with 195 caregivers and 70 practitioners in the four countries in April-May 2018, this study found that, while the effects of conflict and displacement are clear among host and displaced families, there remain both universalities of childhood and parenthood. On parenting, the study found that while many caregivers enjoy the feeling of parenthood, the instability of the region presents many difficult challenges as they are or fear they will be unable to secure their children’s basic needs. Despite these challenges, caregivers shared many daily moments of joy with their children, including examples of children showing affection and kindness, acting silly, and demonstrating personal development.
On questions around culture, findings show that when caregivers teach their kids about culture, there are four main buckets: Arab social customs and traditions, social values, national history, and religious practices and principles. Relatedly, caregivers report that children’s roles models in real-life and the media are aligned around helping others, kindness, and being smart and strong.
When asked what a new children’s TV show should teach, caregivers prioritize academic skills, followed by socio-emotional and hygiene skills. Parents would also like a new TV show to also help them learn more on behavior modification techniques, positive discipline methods, new methods in child rearing from youth to adolescence, and raising special needs children.
These findings will be used to inform content production as well as future formative research and evaluation measures as this initiative seeks to ensure that children and caregivers have access to media content that is relevant to their needs and interests, while also working to provide children with early learning opportunities to alleviate the adverse effects of displacement and support their early learning outcomes.

Authors

• Kim Foulds, Sesame Workshop

• Reem Zada, Jordan Pioneers