Kareem Edward: The main job with my production hat is nuance. We have this broad discussion about equity and inclusion, but we miss the cultural nuance of representation across the spectrum, especially for young children. And the work that I do – both in an academic space and then also in production work – makes sure that the missing voices, especially from black and brown students, immigrant students and LGBTQ students, are represented at across a wide [range of media]especially in children’s STEM media.

This does two things. First, it provides motivation and inspiration, when you see yourself reflected. And the second thing we encounter is the lack of creators [of entertainment shows]the real creators of the content who also look like the young people we seek to reach.

When you were a kid watching kids shows, did you feel like something was missing?

As a young black man, there was always a coming-of-age story, and it was always focused on white men. Like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars – very focused on white men – and all the cartoons.

And I’m not saying we had no representation [in media], but the portrayal wasn’t direct enough to speak to me, to see me reflected where I felt confident, I felt appreciated, and I also felt the nuance of who I see on screen. And part of that was that a lot of that was going through a blank stare.

There was a very limited discussion about how we represent black boys, for example. If you’re old enough to remember the TV show “Recess,” one of the characters was a black man wearing a basketball jersey and high-top shoes. Something was still missing, in the fact that this character was very flat – which most 80s and 90s cartoons were very flat to begin with – but it was really flat, especially for black boys and girls black.

So you’re saying he felt off balance?

My parents are from Haiti, so being not only black but also Haitian was another part of the immigration story that I was looking to see reflected. And we haven’t seen that. It was always a very particular East Coast story of what a black boy was.

So the work that I do, particularly at the ILLEST lab, is that we seek to challenge those constructs and really try to move this conversation forward that there are opportunities to not only see each other, but also to be creators active in the process.

In your career, you have also been a primary and secondary school teacher. How did that inform your thinking? No. 1, young people don’t really listen to you as a teacher, they absorb the culture outside the classroom. So Carol Lee is an academic I really care about, and she’s framing it through this conversation about “cultural modeling.” So you bring what is outside the culture into the classroom. And one of the first lines of engagement for young people is the media they consume. So the kindergarten teachers I hung out with and worked with, they always referenced their cartoons. So we worked by critiquing some of the cartoons they watched and really talking about how to influence their own development.

The second thing is just to be very direct. It’s not just cartoons. This is a multi-billion dollar industry, and there are avenues where you can get government funding. And then you also have multiple streaming platforms paying millions for creators to expand. So young people are starting to understand and see that, and now they’re starting to ask questions about how they can be represented and access content that’s really not just for them and their personal development, but then also where this content fits into the cultural zeitgeist.

How did you come to work on a show for PBS by applying your research?

The idea was already there – by two wonderful executive producers, Marcy Gunther and Marisa Wolsky from WGBH Boston – who approached me to have a conversation about diversity and equity. So they had the framework, the roadmap for this show, and they really wanted to figure out how they could make this show even more accessible.

So the first thing I did with my partner, Dr. Darlene Edouard, we got together and watched some early clips from the show and started thinking, what are the cultural touchpoints?

One thing was the intro and the musical framing [of the theme]. So we made sure to put some raps in there, and I remember sitting down with the young actors and walking them through how to hit the different points in the rap to give them a really clear and nuanced expression of how to play that.

What is the basic premise of the show?

It centers on the three wombats – Malik, Sadie, and Zeke – and their family matriarch, Grandma Super. They all live in a tree, and he tracks them using computational thinking (CT) skills to solve problems. And part of it centers around how these young wombats engage — not just solving problems in the neighborhood, but then navigating the community that’s been built.

So part of what wombats do for us in terms of that talk, particularly having a grandma as the head of the family, is that there’s a lot of our students or our viewers who live in a family without a mother or father, but grandma raises them. … Really, what we tried to do in designing the treeborhood was to reflect what America looks like. And then also taking into account that we’re talking about CT skills and how important they are.

How do you incorporate STEM themes into a show for such young children?

So it’s a team affair. I’m sitting here, but it’s still a team thing. And my favorite episode is the cornbread episode. So #1, we started the cultural framing by talking, how do you make cornbread? Everyone makes cornbread differently, and we wanted to involve that in the show. But part of a CT framework is process, logic, and organization.

They wanted to make Super Grandma’s Special Cornbread, but they were missing some ingredients. So they had to taste different types of cornbread to determine and isolate what the missing ingredient was. And that’s the work you do when you start coding and go through nested “if” statements. But how do you introduce that to a 3-5 year old, right? So part of that is making sure that we incorporate all of those seven CT skills into activities and also scenarios that later when you go to the website, you play the interactive game or engage in the One of the programs you find in the classroom is where not only the games but the teachers can continue to reinforce the learning that was done on the show.

Do you think things are changing and improving in the representations of STEM in children’s media in general?

No. The creative and editorial teams still don’t reflect the audience they seek to reach. And then secondly, [there’s a need to] provide fellowship and career path opportunities for people from underrepresented communities to join.

One of the things we’re proud of at Work It Out Wombats is that we have a writing scholarship because my wife and I have made it clear that to create these cultural and nuanced discussions, we need writers, not just writers who are underrepresented, but we also need women. We also need people with an immigrant background, because we have characters here from a variety of backgrounds. In order to have a real authentic voice for all these characters to present, you need the writers to create that.

How does your lab play into this?

The main focus is how to create a culturally sustainable STEM engagement for black children? And we have something called the Sneaker Lab where I have about 600 sneakers in there, and we design and create sneakers through the concept of material science. And being in the animation business and working in a space where creativity is at its peak, I decided to open an animation lab [in ILLEST Lab] and I bring black students from West Philadelphia High School to come to the lab and engage.

It’s currently in its early stages, where we’re doing a bit of stop-motion work. In the latest Spider-Verse movie, there’s a [14-year-old] Black man who animated on YouTube and TikTok who was asked to come and create a sequence with Legos for the film. And I think those are the opportunities that we need to start cultivating and strategizing to get as many young people into this space so they can design and create, so they can get opportunities later.

Listen to the full conversation on this week’s EdSurge podcast.