Dorothea Gillim GSE '91 (Writer, Producer, & Director, WORLDGIRL)
By Sean O'Rourke MAT '68
“We never outgrow our need for vocabulary,” my high school biology teacher used to say. Dorothea Gillim, GSE '91, would agree. Growing up in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, she once asked her parents for an unabridged dictionary for Christmas. At Swarthmore she majored in English and learned how stories of all sorts influence how we see ourselves and the world.
After college she worked at a chamber music society and did a stint as a ski bum. She mollified her parents by telling them she planned to apply to law school, but when none of the family’s lawyer friends encouraged her, she took a job teaching at the Springside School in Philadelphia. She enjoyed creating curriculum and stimulating her students’ interest in books and language but eventually decided that she wanted a larger audience.
So she enrolled in a master’s degree program at the Harvard School of Education (earning it in 1991), where a course in media education introduced her to the theories of Alfred North Whitehead. “If the three stages of learning are romance, mastery and generalization,” she says, “then I think TV is best used to romance kids to learn a subject.” This principle has guided her work ever since. Kids come seeking amusement and go away having learned something of value.
After graduation, Gillim worked in the field of educational media and as a freelance writer until she went to Tom Snyder Productions, an educational software company in Watertown, Massachusetts. She soon realized that she did not like software development, but she had learned to edit audio. The company’s first animated series, "Dr. Katz", on Comedy Central, needed an audio editor, so she joined the team. Gillim produced the company’s second animated show, Science Court, for ABC Saturday Morning. Then she developed "Hey Monie", a show about a single black woman in Chicago who has an annoying boss, a best friend in the same building and a neighbor with a crush on her. The show aired on Oxygen and the Black Entertainment Network (BET).
In 2001, Scholastic bought the company and renamed it Soup2Nuts. Gillim is now the creator and executive producer of "WordGirl", a show aimed at four to nine-year-olds that airs daily on PBS. Born on the planet Lexicon, the heroine arrived on earth when her spaceship crashed, stranding her and her monkey sidekick, Captain Huggy Face. WordGirl can fly at the speed of light, is incredibly strong and has an immense vocabulary. She sometimes forgets that her sidekick, who is a monkey, cannot fly, and he has to take the bus.
WordGirl’s adoptive parents Tim and Sally Botsford have no idea of who she really is. They think she is Becky Botsford, a quiet and studious fifth grader. Her best friend Violet, artistic and absent-minded, does not suspect either, but Todd “Scoops” Ming, a reporter for the school newspaper, is determined to find out the true identity of WordGirl.
WordGirl fights a motley collection of villains: Dr. Two Brain, whose own brain is fused with the brain of a lab mouse; the Butcher, who constantly mangles the English language; Granny May, who tricks people by her sweet grandmotherly persona; Chuck the Evil Sandwich Making Guy, who wants to take over the world with sandwiches; and Tobey, a boy genius who unleashes his robots on the city.
Gillim believes that vocabulary development is the key to literacy and that children learn words better by seeing and hearing them in meaningful contexts than by looking them up in a dictionary. Every episode consists of two 11-minute segments that introduce two vocabulary words such as "enormous", "diversion", "coincidence", "squint" or "idolize". The targeted words are repeated regularly before they are defined.
A lot of education television is unnecessarily earnest. Gillim hires comedy writers who do not usually work in children’s television. The actors who provide voices for "WordGirl"’s characters come from shows like "Arrested Development", "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "Saturday Night Live". Many have backgrounds in stand-up comedy. They are encouraged to improvise and some of their ad libs find their way into the show. Children “tune in for the laughs but hopefully happen to learn a few things along the way,” Gillim says.
Gillim and writer Jack Ferraiolo originally developed "WordGirl" in 2001, but it sat on the shelf for three years until PBS took an interest in it. The show began as a series of shorts within the bilingual cartoon show Maya & Miguel and was so well received that PBS ordered twenty-six full length episodes. The show is now in its second season and has already won an Emmy and a Television Critics Award. “The fact that the show got made at all was a stunning achievement,” Gillim says. “The fact that we have so much fun working on it continues to be rich and rewarding. To get such accolades on top of that is just icing on the cake.”