Interview with Elizabeth Jones

What are you doing now and how did you get there?

I'm on the faculty at Pacific Oaks College, where I've spent my whole professional life. I didn't select a career; it found me. I grew up in an era in which middle-class women didn't have to have a career, just get married and have children. (I did that too.) Many of those women discovered early childhood when their own children went to preschool, especially to parent co-ops, but I got there a little sooner when, as an English major toward the end of my junior year of college, I started wondering what I wanted to be when I grew up. I would have to go to graduate school to learn to do something, and I certainly didn't want to do it in English. (My boring major professor, a Chaucer scholar, spoke enthusiastically about "scholahly detective work," but I liked reading novels and plays, not analyzing them. I even went to talk to the chair of the Education department about teaching, but he was boring too.) So I started hanging around the Sociology and Psychology departments to see what was happening there. Working with people somehow seemed like the next challenge for basic-introvert me.

The department chair in Sociology was not at all boring - he did good work for good causes - but the other two faculty members in the department were. Psychology, however, had several interesting projects going on, including a play therapy clinic; and they offered a clinical psych class that introduced Rogerian client-centered therapy (and was taught non-directively as well). I took it and was hooked. I changed my major in my senior year, got an assistantship in the play therapy clinic (and learned, when my client refused to go into the playroom, that I didn't know anything about four year olds), read everything I could get my hands on, applied to graduate school in Child Development, got a research assistantship at the University of Wisconsin, and visited my soc prof's wife's co-op preschool before graduating, since I'd never been in a preschool and was about to go work in one.

In Madison I learned all about observing children and, incidentally, about teaching preschool. (Observing them is still my favorite thing to do.) And when I was ready to graduate and about to move back to California (having had enough of winter), I responded to an ad for a preschool teacher in Pacific Oaks Friends School. I got the job, settled happily into Los Angeles, was asked to teach a class in Music for Young Children the next summer (in the newly hatched Teacher Education program which became Pacific Oaks College a few years later), and spent the next few decades learning to teach adults in the same way I had learned to teach children - developmentally, emergently, actively, playfully.

Every time I've learned to do something well, and thus started to get tired of it, a new opportunity has come along. I'm an inventor of new opportunities, but the crucial part has been that I've experienced support from administrators and colleagues for my ideas. "That's a good idea. What support do you need?" is the response I remember getting from Evangeline Burgess in my first year at Pacific Oaks, in my early 20's. I noticed at the time that she never offered to take over, only to back me up if I did the work. "Do the work" (which, at some points, has included volunteering to take minutes at meetings - a position with built-in power) has become my basic advice to myself and others. For me that often translates into "Write it down," since I love to write; it's how I think. I've written articles and books not for any of the conventional get-tenure/get-famous reasons, but out of curiosity.

This description of getting-to-do-what-I-want-to-do makes it sound too easy. From idea to reality there is, in the Pacific Oaks community, a long tradition of discussion, argument, opposition, empathy, negotiation, and eventual consensus. I also learned early on that another older colleague would always oppose my ideas the first time I tried them in a meeting. Unlike Evangeline, she wasn't an optimist; her life had been too hard. But she was loving nonetheless, and so I learned patience. Take the proposal back, think some more, write some more, bring the revision to the next meeting, argue, listen, go home and revise it again. By the third time round, I had generally earned enough points for respect and diligence and persistence that she and others would approve it. (I later discovered that this process also works well with a board of trustees skeptical of faculty ideas.)

Over the years I've had a hand in starting and growing Pacific Oaks College, its MA program, its distance learning program online, its academic centers in other locations, publication of students' and colleagues' work. Many of my students have become my colleagues, worldwide, and I delight in continuing to work with them, wherever they are. Our family traveled a lot, but in the West in a pickup truck, to go camping. I didn't have a passport till I was 50, but now I use it whenever I can.

Predict the future for early childhood education in the next 10 years. What is the most significant change coming? What stays the same?

"I'm both heartened and worried...that early childhood as a time for important learning has become politicized, and therefore corrupted."

I'm both heartened and worried by my observation that our insistence that early childhood is a time for important learning has become politicized, and therefore corrupted. Young children learn through play, as they always have - but play is suspect, and so we're faced with the cynical fiction of No Child Left Behind, and standardized testing of competences that can't be measured by a test. More education for early childhood teachers/caregivers correlates with increased quality in ECE programs, and so everyone is supposed to keep taking college courses - but too many college courses, like standardized testing, are built on a deficit model of weeding out the ones who haven't learning to play the school game, in English. ECE, with its open admission for both children and their caregivers, has been a uniquely open profession, which any responsible adult could join. Are there any other professional organizations like NAEYC, which anyone can join?

Contemporary America still screens out the have-nots and many folks of color, it just claims not to do so any more. Dropping out of high school was once the sensible thing to do in your teens, if school wasn't a good fit for you and there was other work to be done in the world and other ways to learn it. Good preschool experiences are good for all children. Caring for young children is sensibly an entry-level work opportunity - for new immigrants, for young people, for adults in need of employment. The career lattice is an inspired model for professional development in ECE, since a group of young children needs more than one adult present. A move toward higher degree requirements is thus both a good thing and a bad thing, from my perspective. If it makes the field more exclusive, it's a bad thing. If it creates opportunities to build on diverse people's diverse strengths, it's a wonderful thing.

What would you say to a student who was considering choosing ECE or advocacy as a field of study and a career? What specifically would you say to someone who is interested in becoming an early childhood administrator?

Early childhood educators are the most interesting people anywhere. If they're good with children, they have to be playful - and they often keep playing even when children aren't present. Most other professional conferences are truly boring - just people in suits reading their scholarly papers. Early childhood conferences, in contrast, are worth going to. Teaching children is a way to be of service to humanity, and to enjoy one's days while doing so.

I have enormous respect for early childhood administrators. If you're an administrator, most of your time is spent responding to other people's needs. I'm not that friendly; I need more space for myself. But I have lots of experience with good and not-so-good administrators and I know the difference. The good ones make the world go round.

What brief message would you like to provide to EOE readers?

I'm going to my first World Forum this May, in Montreal, and I'm inspired by its emphasis on The Power of Early Childhood as a Force for Reconciliation. Many people in the world, especially those with lots of power, find war more dramatically interesting than peacemaking and so they keep inflicting it on everyone else. War is not healthy for children or other living things, as our bumper stickers used to say. Killing enemies is easier than problem solving with all those folks not like us. I've just written a book with Renatta Cooper, Playing to Get Smart (Teachers College Press, late 2005), and in it we quote Holly Elissa Bruno's wonderful story from Exchange magazine (2003):

When I think differences can never be bridged, I remind myself of President Jimmy Carter's negotiating a peace agreement between two archenemies. President Carter created a safe, non-judgmental space of wonderment for the leaders of two warring powers, Israel and Egypt, to find common ground. Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin carried the scars of centuries of jihad. Sadat and Begin did not want to be in the same room, and certainly not at the same side of the table.

Something inspired President Carter to invite each man to talk about his grandchildren. "Tell us about them, what they are like, what they love, what they want to be," encouraged Carter. Slowly the stiffly defended men softened into gentle, beaming grandfathers with endless stories of delight. In the end, leaders Sadat and Begin agreed that the world should be a safer, saner place for their grandchildren than it had been for them. The peace accord was signed. A humble President Carter added his own cultural history in announcing the accord: In my religious heritage, we say 'blessed are the peacemakers.'

It all begins with little children.