From Limiting Beliefs to Limitless Potential: How Mister Rogers and Barbie Inspired My Learning Design of a Multimedia Curriculum for Young Children
It was never my intention to pull a Mister Rogers.
Then again — was it?
As a children’s media researcher and learning designer, I’m keenly aware of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’s pedagogical punch. In fact, I dedicate an entire class session to this show and its spin-off, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, in the course I teach on youth and media at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
When media are crafted sensitively, designed to meet children where they’re at and loaded with meaningful lessons, then young children can demonstrate significant learning outcomes.
Maybe this was in the back of my head when my colleagues at the Center for Scholars & Storytellers and I accepted an important challenge…
Context
Barbie, a brand first-famous for inventing 11.5-inch fashion dolls, has evolved into a cultural icon, and after 60+ years, was still the number one toy property in the world in 2020. Over the years, Barbie has had over 200 careers, nine body types, 35 skin tones, and 94 hairstyles. The brand’s slogan proudly declares: You Can Be Anything.
So, when a team of NYU researchers published data suggesting that some young children can’t be anything, and implicated stereotypes as a major reason why, Barbie took notice. The research found that, by the age of 6, many children begin to embrace limiting beliefs, specifically:
Girls stop believing that they are as smart as boys
Boys stop believing that they are as kind as girls
Girls avoid demonstrating their leadership skills
Girls and boys doubt that girls can be anything
Internalizing these beliefs can lead children to marginalize themselves and others. And there goes everyone’s chance to be anything.
Barbie labeled the space between children’s limitless potential and their limiting beliefs “The Dream Gap.” And to help close it, Barbie funds partner organizations impacting girls directly, inspires girls through meaningful content, highlights inspirational women through their role models program, and now has commissioned a stereotype-defying curriculum.
That’s where we came in.
Barbie Dream Gap Curriculum — The Original
My colleagues and I designed the Barbie Dream Gap Curriculum by working backward. Our goal was to disrupt young children’s trajectories towards both stereotyping others by gender and denying themselves the opportunity to be their whole selves. Which “tools” would young children need in their “toolboxes” in order to get there?
First, we reasoned, they would need to feel empowered to authentically contribute. Lesson 1: Participation. Second, they would need to believe in their ability to learn and improve through effort. Lesson 2: Growth Mindset. Third, they would need to expect challenges and recover from setbacks. Lesson 3: Resilience. Fourth, they would need to celebrate their unique talents and interests. Lesson 4: Multiple Intelligences. Fifth, they would need to picture themselves in numerous and stereotype-defying occupations. Lesson 5: Careers. Sixth, they would need to step into their power. Lesson 6: Leadership.
To explicitly push back against harmful stereotypes, not only pertaining to gender but also to race/ethnicity, class, nationality, and ability, we incorporated the stories of diverse role models, including: Jovita Idár, Helen Keller, Junko Tabei, Fred Rogers, Maggie Lena Walker, and Annie Dodge Wauneka.
Our curriculum organically intersected with multiple social and emotional learning (SEL) goals. Research shows that universal, school-based SEL programs benefit K-12 students across a variety of measures in the short- and long-term. So, we aligned our curriculum to SEL standards.
We formatted the curriculum as a K-2 teacher-facing collection of lesson plans, worksheets, and newsletters, with an original, live-action video and a poster accompanying each lesson.
In our 2019 pilot in El Segundo, California, the curriculum demonstrated promising results. Independent evaluators conducted a classic experiment, collecting pre- and post-test data from intervention and control groups. Findings showed that the curriculum:
Expanded children’s interest in more careers
Increased all girls’ beliefs that anyone could be a good leader
Inspired more 2nd grade girls to identify females as “really really smart” and to say YES to the question, “Do you think you can be anything?”
To say I was excited would be putting it mildly. First, El Segundo. Next, the world!
Then a little something unexpected happened in 2020... Perhaps you can recall…
Barbie Dream Gap Curriculum — Take Two
Barbie challenged us to adapt the curriculum for online learning. In digital form, the lessons could reach remote and hybrid learners as well as support diverse educators.
We reimagined our curriculum as a video series featuring Community Club, an after-school club whose members yearn to help people and animals and fix things in their communities. Community Club meets online, via a video conferencing platform like Zoom -- and the students viewing the content just stumbled into its meeting. Welcome to Community Club! We split each lesson (aka, each Community Club meeting) across three videos, separated by two interactive opportunities where students could answer a question by clicking on an icon.
Channeling my inner Rogers, I played Dr. Rachel Klein, the club’s warm-and-fuzzy advisor. In that role, I facilitated many of the same activities as our original lesson plans. I also created three characters to populate Community Club’s membership:
Jada, an inquisitive, independent third-grader who identifies as a Chinese-American girl and manages anxiety;
Lulu, a thoughtful, methodical third-grader who identifies as a Black girl and as “quiet,” or introverted; and
Mateo, a gentle, collaborative third-grader who identifies as a Mexican-American boy and lives with hearing loss.
These characters were brought to life by bespoke hand and rod puppets, each operated by a puppeteer and separately voiced by an actor whose identity matched that of the character.
Educators and students nationwide piloted the curriculum this spring — thank you to participating schools in Boston, Chicago, and Austin! So far, we’ve gotten lots of positive feedback.
“I felt that the lesson was well thought out and kid friendly.”
“Loved the video with the student leader. It is so helpful for students to see the ideas in action. Also, really wonderful for them to see themselves reflected in the people in the video.”
“It was very beneficial how the puppets shared how they cope with differences, hearing loss and anxious thoughts.”
We will continue piloting the curriculum this summer — thank you to participating after-school organizations in South Carolina! — and in the fall. We look forward to combing through the data and discovering whether/how this multimedia experience serves children.
As to bridging The Dream Gap… Mr. Rogers once said, “There's a world of difference between insisting on someone's doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.”
So, our work does not end at curriculum. Here’s to all of us, in our own unique ways, establishing an atmosphere, a society, a world that inspires everyone to want to unlock opportunity — so our kids can be anything.
Principal, Laurel Felt Consulting
Lecturer, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
Senior Fellow, Center for Scholars and Storytellers
P.S. This project was a labor of love for so many people!!! To quote Fred Rogers, “I hope you're proud of yourself for the times you've said "yes," when all it meant was extra work for you and was seemingly helpful only to someone else." I am beyond grateful and humbled by your brilliance.
THANK YOU:
Maggie Chieffo, Yalda T. Uhls, Hannah Demetor, Kathryn Lenihan, Kim Wilson, Colleen Russo Johnson, Josanne Buchanan, Rosie Molinary, Mary Faber, Benari Poulten, Hand to Mouth Creative, Jenn Guptill, Katie O’Brien, Jaz Nannini, Students of Spring 2021 COMM 457, Sarah Berman, Chris Patstone, Miles Taber, Karen Barazza, Jenny W. Chan, Whitney Watters, Adam Blau, Gaby Moreno, Deborah S. Craig, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Nir Liebenthal, Page Spencer, Caroline Fung, Annie Meyers, Zach Stuckelman, Sina Zakeri, Anita Narkhede, Arelyse Campos, Rebeca Ruiz, Tina Garoosi, Gillian Jewell, Jill Shinderman, Kat O’Brien, Corinne, Everett, Mike Colby, Sasha, Andrea Merfeld, Lexi, Randi Ralph, Molly, Annie, Cyndi Otteson, Quinn, Ellie Chadwick, Richie, Kimmi Berlin, Ari, Diomaris Safi, Mila, Miry Whitehill, Ruben, Rebecca Fox, Ruthie, Muriel, Gardenia Spiegel, Koa, Rachel Deano, Jada.
Mining 21st-Century Skills at Home with Technology
This article is part of our #LearningAtHome2020 series with the Child & Family Blog and BOLD
Just one year ago, the phrase “learning at home” may have conjured different images for parents and educators, unless home-schooling was already the norm. Families the world over have experienced disruptions to daily life and the challenges of distance learning brought on by the pandemic. Teachers with a reluctance for technology in the classroom have had to make an abrupt shift to reach their students. Parents who have chosen to limit their children’s time with digital devices have been challenged by the inevitable increase in screen time as education went virtual. The line between work and home life has blurred, just as the line between screen time and simply, time, is ever-blurring.
I’m sure your family could use a break from the math or literacy talk, so I’m going to give you some ideas on how you can encourage your children’s development of 21st-century skills such as critical thinking, communication, and creativity through digital play. This is not nearly as daunting a task as it seems. After all, parents and caregivers are children’s first educators and the home environment is their first classroom. Children learn, develop, and make sense of their world through play. But just as screen time and “time” are increasingly intertwined, our use of digital media as tools for learning needs to evolve. We need to literally think outside the TV or touchscreen box and not be constrained by it.
An example of a playful, open-ended digital world is the video game, Minecraft. In Minecraft, the sky is the limit--within this world, players are bound by their own imaginations. For this reason, Minecraft presents many opportunities to foster a number of 21st-century skills.
The 4 Cs: Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking
Video games abound with opportunities for social connection and collaboration. Collaboration involves two or more people in a shared effort to learn or solve a problem together. Susan Danby and colleagues provided detailed accounts of children helping each other succeed in various digital environments, and in various regions of the world (Norway, Sweden, and Australia). They provided an example of Australian siblings, ages 4 and 7 years old, traversing a shared digital world (Minecraft) as they acquired resources and combatted zombies. Even though the two children were on their own devices, they engaged in play that demonstrated communication patterns indicative of collaboration and instruction. Children who play games together learn perspective-taking and must consider each others’ shared knowledge.
While the potential to learn and develop 21st-century skills in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) such as Minecraft exists, transferring these skills to the real-world is less straightforward. When I was the lab manager at the Swinburne Babylab in Australia, I remember entertaining a sibling of one of our research participants. I say “entertaining,” but in reality, I provided him with scrap paper and colored pencils and his imagination took care of the rest. I was so impressed as he explained that he was drawing and planning a building that he would later construct in Minecraft. This is just one example of how the digital world and the physical world can connect to encourage the transfer of skills, such as creativity.
In addition to creativity, researchers have also found that playing Minecraft encourages critical thinking and problem-solving; students who used Minecraft to accomplish various tasks commented on how the game-design forced them to think outside the box. This innovative and creative approach to problem-solving was also shown in a group of 13 year-olds who completed an 8-week workshop in which they were asked to create and explain their products in Minecraft. After the workshop, students’ scores on a test of creativity improved, and their teacher also observed improvements in the students’ creativity. Not only does Minecraft enable the user to have creative freedom, but it can also encourage players to seek information from outside resources, such as reading content on forums or watching or creating Youtube tutorials, etc. This multimodal literacy is referred to as metagaming.
Actionable Insights
Content creators can provide learning opportunities for children by:
Creating open-ended environments that lack an explicit goal, “freedom of play”
Providing opportunities to help characters. Prosocial content promotes prosocial behaviors such as helping and empathy.
Having more tools to choose from to encourage greater creativity in problem-solving.
Providing opportunities to interact with and explore the environment.
Encouraging replayability by making sure the game experience isn’t linear or the same every time.
Content creators can help parents create learning opportunities for their children by:
Providing a curriculum with suggestions on how to take the digital content to the real world and practice specific skills, depending on the goal.
e.g., plan a garden in Minecraft and then plant a real garden
Recognizing that the digital world extends beyond its intended medium, and children can create educational videos for others to improve their gameplay or participate in online forums to share ideas.
Happy playing!
Brittany Huber, PhD
Collaborator of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers
Supporting Parents with Children’s Distance Learning
This article is part of our #LearningAtHome2020 series with the Child & Family Blog and BOLD
If you’re a parent of a school-aged child - or know a parent - you know about the anxieties and challenges around children’s distance-learning. Earlier this year when many states shut down schools for in-person learning, teachers and parents scrambled to support kids in making the quick transition. Parents’ and caregivers’ roles shifted overnight, requiring them to be co-teachers and co-learners as they tried to support kids with distance learning. And this is just the parents who are able to stay home with kids. Many parents had to go to their job sites and leave their kids to fend for themselves. Months later, it is clear that distance learning is not going away. Many schools will transition back to hybrid learning, which means some will be in-person and some at-home. There have been, and will also likely be, more outbreaks that cause some re-opened schools to shut down again.
In March, Common Sense Media launched Wide Open School to support parents with distance learning. This new service curates the best-of-the-best free learning activities for kids and resources for families that make at-home learning easier through user-friendly daily schedules, activities to support children’s social and emotional well-being, digital citizenship, and materials that address learning and thinking differences.
So based on what parents and children are experiencing right now at this moment in time, what should children’s media creators do to support families? Consider the following tips on supporting parents with their children’s learning.
Address Character Education
Character Education and social-emotional learning (SEL) is in great need (and great demand) both by parents and schools. SEL content is some of our top-requested content on Wide Open School. With the combination of the coronavirus pandemic, economic downturn, civil unrest, police violence, and school closures, there are extreme pressures on the mental health of kids and families. Including characters, stories, and learning that develop characteristics for children such as community, perseverance, humility, empathy, and self-control helps build strong, resilient children. See Common Sense Media’s article Building Character Strengths with Quality Media and our report Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health for support in thinking about these issues.
Model caregivers and children learning together
Some parents may have rarely supported their children’s schoolwork. They may lack role models to show them how to be a co-teacher and co-learner with their child, or how to be a collaborator with their child’s teacher. Content producers can illustrate and normalize life-long learning as an ongoing and cross-generational practice, in which caregivers, older siblings, and children are learning together and supporting one another. Whether it’s providing advice or showing a parent sitting with a child engaging in their distance learning, or tips for parents such as the importance of having children follow their distance learning schedule, parents need to see examples of what their role could be. Moreover, parents are searching for high-quality educational content to supplement their child’s at-home learning. Suggesting exceptional, research-based apps, websites, and games for parents to use in conjunction with their child’s school learning will provide much-needed help.
Encourage media balance
Screen use has been increasing over the years, even before the pandemic hit. On average, daily screen/device use at home is about three hours for two through eight-year-olds, 5 hours for tweens, and 7 hours for teens (Common Sense Media, 2017, 2019). These amounts have increased due to the addition of distance learning time. Heavy media use is associated with physical and mental health problems. Though we know that not all screen time is created equal, we need to encourage media balance, which means balancing media use with other meaningful activities in everyday life. For example, in schools, Go Noodle is so popular, especially for 5-13-year-olds, because it gets kids up and out of their chairs and moving their bodies. Getting the body moving and taking tech breaks helps reduce stress and improves focus and mental clarity. Content creators might want to consider building these kinds of intermissions into their programming.
Foster digital citizenship
The importance of digital citizenship - thinking critically and participating responsibly online - has come to the forefront, especially as kids do distance learning. Parents are looking for guidance to help their kids make good choices about protecting their online privacy, being kind and civil communicators, and thinking critically about the things they see online (discerning misinformation). Companies such as Disney have run campaigns to address digital citizenship issues, including cyberbullying. But beyond social awareness campaigns, kids need to see examples of ways they could handle “digital dilemmas” that come up in their lives such as: What do I do if I see someone say something mean or hurtful online? What should I consider before sharing a photo or video? How can I tell if something I see online is true or not? Successful digital learning - both at school and at home - starts with digital citizenship.
Actionable Insights
Children’s media producers can serve the present needs of caregivers and children by:
Creating content that addresses character education and supports social-emotional learning.
Providing models for how children and their caregivers can best interact with one another and educators while engaging in at-home learning.
Encouraging children to take breaks from screen time in favor of physical and screen-free activities.
Fostering digital citizenship so kids behave safely and participate responsibly online.
Kelly Mendoza, PhD
Senior Director of Education Programs, Common Sense Education
Collaborator of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers