Rruga Sesam/Ulica Sezam Humanizes the “Other” in A Recovering Region

It’s far from simple to create a children’s television show in a post-conflict region where people still feel the tension of recent violence, but that’s exactly what UNICEF and Sesame Workshop managed to do in 2004, when both parties saw what could be gained from a locally produced version of Sesame Street. The result – aired in Albanian with the title Rruga Sesam and in Serbian as Ulica Sezam – has become a powerful tool in healing rifts between the Kosovo-Albanian and Kosovo-Serb peoples as they move toward reconciliation.

Finding common ground across ethnic lines

Rruga Sesam/Ulica Sezam is the first educational media initiative to be produced locally in Kosovo and to provide children of diverse ethnic backgrounds with age-appropriate messages of mutual respect and understanding.

Kids spend time with their dad.

“Hate … is a learned trait,” Nikonorow says. “Children don’t naturally hate someone of another ethnicity; this is taught to them or they pick it up from snippets of conversation and stereotyping.”

Sesame Workshop producer Basia Nikonorow says that Rruga Sesam/Ulica Sezam’s first season focused on “humanizing the other,” helping children to unlearn stereotypes about other ethnicities and to adopt mutual respect.

The team set out to achieve this goal through live action films that featured children interacting in storylines that promoted respect and understanding – but there was a wrinkle. It’s a fact of life in today’s Kosovo that children of different ethnicities simply don’t interact with each other. They attend different schools, ride different buses, speak different languages, and even use different postal services. So the show’s producers grappled with how to portray children together, and eventually developed montages containing several films threaded together, with each piece featuring children of one ethnicity. Each piece of the montage focuses on children of one ethnicity. Besides Albanian and Serbian children, the films also show Roma, Bosnian, and Turkish youngsters.

Sesame Workshop associate producer Estee Bardanashvili explains, “There was no kind of separation of these kids; they were all in the montage, so it flows.”

Nikonorow says that the aim was to show children that “the other” has a name and shares an age and other similarities with the viewer. The films stress that each child has a family and may have a sibling or like to spend time with their grandmother, just like the viewer does.

Producers also specifically sought children with different attributes -- whether it was appearance, religion, ethnicity, or skin color -- to “break down stereotypes and show that each one of us is unique and is to be respected for who we are,” Nikonorow says.

The films incorporated lessons from a mutual respect and understanding curriculum that Sesame Workshop’s education and research team tailored to Kosovo’s needs based on an in-country seminar that brought local experts together with the production and education, research, and outreach teams. The main lessons motivate children to identify similarities with other children, to be receptive to a foreign child or a child of a different ethnicity, and to be receptive to a child who speaks a different language.

Developing a “visual dictionary”

Kosovo’s two official alphabets proved to be a hot button issue during the show’s development. While Cyrillic is important to Serbians, who all learn this alphabet early on as well as the Latinic alphabet, Albanian children learn only the Latinic alphabet. In fact, Albanians don’t want to see Cyrillic at all because of its connections to the historical cultural domination imposed by f.r.Yugoslavia.

A Visual Dictionary segment focuses on "glasses."

“The minute you put Cyrillic or Latinic on screen, you’re already making a very divisive choice,” Nikonorow says.

It was a conundrum: how to address literacy without the benefit of written letters and words? Rocio Galarza, a member of Sesame Workshop’s education, research, and outreach team, suggested a groundbreaking approach that teaches literacy through the spoken word rather than the written format. The result of further team brainstorming is the “visual dictionary,” a series of short multilingual clips that show children of different ethnicities holding an object and saying its name in their own languages. The visual dictionary focuses on the concept of common ideas throughout the languages, which include Turkish, Roma, and Croatian in addition to Albanian and Serbian. The simple rhythm encourages children to mimic the language they just heard, even if it isn’t their own.

Sesame Workshop’s assistant director of international education and research, Ilana Umansky, says that the visual dictionary is powerful even if the children don’t learn the other languages they are hearing.

“It’s a beautiful message: We’re all children, we all care about the same things, and we have different ways of saying the same things,” she says.

Highlighting a child’s right to a carefree childhood

Rruga Sesam and Ulica Sezam also have a strong focus on a child’s right to play and to live a carefree childhood. The show’s second season in particular focused on play as an activity that brings children together.

“We decided that kids shouldn’t suffer from the mess the adults had created,” Nikonorow says. “They deserve a carefree childhood.”

One live action piece features music with lyrics encouraging children to “play all day without break.” The clip shows children jumping rope, playing with toys, playing in the grass, and most importantly, having a great time with each other.

Research released in early 2008 shows that Rruga Sesam and Ulica Sezam are having a positive impact on children’s mutual respect and understanding. The study, Sesame Workshop’s first attempt to measure the abstract concepts of mutual respect and understanding, showed that the children watching the show are more likely to interact in closer ways with children of a different race or ethnicity. They are also more likely to be accepting of a child that doesn’t speak their language.

Galarza is happy about the results and is proud that Rruga Sesam and Ulica Sezam are affecting the way adults as well as children interact as their society heals.

“It does become a tool for people to express what they hope the future will hold for themselves and their children.”

Funding Partners
Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)
German Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa)
Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)
Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA)
UNICEF
United States Agency for International Development (USAID)

Partners
CMB Productions, in association with LINK

Broadcasters
RTK
TV Puls
TV Herc
TV Most