Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism? Children’s Television as Globalized Multicultural Education examines how international versions of Sesame Street are working to build peace. There are more than thirty co-productions of Sesame Street, which are viewed in over 150 countries. This book focuses on the creation of Sesame Square, the Nigerian version, which is co-produced by Americans and Nigerians and funded by USAID. Sesame Square creators designed the program to teach academic skills and also to promote intergroup tolerance and peaceful coexistence. Some creators hoped that the program could help to build peace among Nigeria’s future generations and to reduce the ethnoreligious tensions that were believed to be contributing to extremism and conflict. To understand this complex undertaking, Naomi Moland spent a year interviewing Sesame Square creators, observing production processes, and conducting episode analysis.

Two key dilemmas emerged as the program’s creators designed episodes to promote peace. First, efforts to celebrate diversity sometimes inadvertently exacerbated intergroup stereotypes. As they designed episodes to recognize diversity, some Sesame Square creators reified boundaries between groups and “othered” certain target audiences. Second, the violent and unjust “public curriculum” in Nigeria—that is, what children were learning from the society around them—threatened to undermine Sesame Square’s tolerance messages. Violent activities by Boko Haram, as well as extrajudicial responses from the Nigerian government, contradicted pro-education and peace messages on Sesame Square.

These are common dilemmas in multicultural and peacebuilding efforts, but they were exacerbated in the Nigerian setting, where demographic divisions, state fragility, and ongoing violence make peaceful coexistence seem unlikely. The book examines Sesame Square as a form of American soft power designed to spread peace and American goodwill in the face of the extremist group Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is forbidden.” It questions whether American models of multiculturalism and peacebuilding should be transplanted into contexts with very different sociocultural realities. In contexts such as Nigeria, educators may need to emphasize unity over diversity, and to teach children about hybrid identities in order to break down the “us-them” binaries that contribute to conflict.

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