Skillsville: How LSU’s Jennifer Curry Is Helping PBS Inspire Future Careers for Underserved Students

LSU’s Jennifer Curry believes that all children deserve to be hopeful and excited about careers and their own futures.

However, barriers exist that can stand between many children and their dreams.

Curry, a professor with LSU's Lutrill & Pearl Payne School of Education, is a consultant for career content for the new Skillsville Innovation Program — a multi-faceted career-education effort anchored by a PBS Kids television series designed to overcome barriers for early elementary students in underserved districts, including those in Louisiana.

 

“Programs like Skillsville impact communities where students may not have a parent or close family member to job shadow, or someone to share with them what it is like to go to a meaningful career each day,” she said. “Skillsville role models adults with careers they love and children exploring career options.”

One key, Curry said, is to expose children to careers early on.

"If you start in high school, you’ve started too late. Children need to see themselves representatively earlier,” she said, noting that by eighth grade, many students have already decided if they’re going to college or not." 

Skillsville is funded through a Ready to Learn grant from U.S. Dept of Education. The project is in its fourth year of development, with plans to begin broadcasting in March 2025.

“I think the most rewarding part of this work has been thinking that I might be helping a child who, like myself, had parents who might not know how to assist in career exploration. Parents want the very best for their children but don’t always know where to begin.” 

Jennifer Curry

Along with the TV series, the program works through partnerships to provide professional development for teachers and school counselors in underserved school districts, helping to establish after-school programs, parent programs, and classroom program development. Partnering districts also can apply for additional funding and resources.

Curry was drawn to LSU because she saw poverty and related educational needs in areas of Louisiana that felt familiar to what she experienced growing up in Kentucky and working in Tennessee.

“I believed I could make an impact here,” she said, adding that Skillsville is an excellent vehicle to do just that.  

She has plans for an upcoming webinar for school counselors across Louisiana, followed by training for children’s librarians in public libraries and school media specialists in elementary schools.

“This gives school counselors an opportunity to learn about the program without having to attend a conference or pay for a platform,” she said. “My goal is to record the training and put it on the Louisiana School Counselor Association website, where it will be a free resource.” 
As teachers implement what they learn, their students will benefit.

“As students in Louisiana watch the show and experience the elements of the program,” she said, “they will also have the opportunity to become career explorers and thereby envision themselves in a range of careers they might not have otherwise known.”

At LSU, Curry teaches in the counselor education program as the Vira Franklin and James R. Eagles professor in the Lutrill & Pearl Payne School of Education. 

She was approached in 2020 by Momoko Hayakawa, managing director of child development and research for Twin Cities PBS (TPT), which developed the Skillsville concept.  
Struggling to find the right person for a key role, Hayakawa discovered that Curry — who has been at LSU for 17 years — was an excellent fit, a career development specialist who could specialize in young children in the Pre-K to third-grade range.  

Curry serves as Skillsville’s leading expert in career exposure for young children. She has provided guidance and feedback on the development of the Skillsville television show, digital games, and educational content to ensure that the program uses current and evidence-based practices.

“Before writing started, I trained the core team on the basics of early childhood career development — theories, research, practices, career clusters,” she said. “I reviewed every script for all 80 shows — twice — and gave feedback on everything from how the career was portrayed to the interaction of the characters.”  

A priority for Skillsville was to ensure the integrity and fidelity of each character’s life experiences. Actors and writers were thoughtfully hired with lived experiences similar to the characters.

The program acknowledges that students who come from low-income homes may also come from homes where they are first-generation college students and/or first-generation professionals.

“Such students need the opportunity to have access and exposure to a range of careers so that they can understand the types of careers that exist and what people in those careers do,” Curry said.  

 

Each episode of the TV series opens with the kids facing some real-world dilemma. They usually take a break of some sort and play a virtual reality game called “Skillsville.”

Once inside the game, they transition into their gaming avatars and try a new career. As they learn about the career, they also apply executive functioning skills. This exposure lets them begin envisioning themselves in a range of careers they might not have otherwise known.   

They usually make some mistakes and have to change their strategies to be successful, often taking a pause in the game to talk through what is going wrong. After exiting the game, they apply what they learn to their real-world problem. 

“In Skillsville, mistakes are expected, and kids get the chance to pause and think through their decisions and think differently about how they want to fix their mistakes or make better decisions. To me, that is true empowerment,” Curry said. 

“The kids in Skillsville make messes sometimes; they make mistakes, and they act like real kids. Our children need to see that fallibility is how we learn to be resilient, not by perfection.”

Curry said LSU has been supportive of her and her work with Skillsville in multiple ways, including trusting her to follow her own research agenda and supporting sabbaticals awarded to her based on career and college readiness projects.  

She also points out that her research agenda is pivotal to LSU’s strategic initiatives, based on President William F. Tate IV’s Pentagon Priorities, which include agriculture, biomedical, coast, defense, and energy.  

Curry also serves as a co-principal investigator for LSU’s S-STEM program, Preparing Resilient Individuals for Success in Engineering (PRISE), which helps high-achieving, high-potential engineering students who have experienced financial hardships and who may have received minimal career preparation in K-12.

“My work lends to filling the K-20 (kindergarten to graduate degree) STEM pipeline,” she said. “To successfully meet the LSU strategic plan and Pentagon Priorities, we need K-12 students to understand their career options beyond what they typically know: doctor, lawyer.

“They need to understand the many options they have and how to successfully navigate those academic opportunities. We also need them to have strategies for success so they believe they can be successful.”  

Additional Information

• Learn more about the program and television series at Skillsville.org
• Helping Young Children Learn and Think About Different Careers
• How to Talk to Young Children about Careers and Support their Curiosity about the Future

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