Research still highly relevant for longtime early childhood education professor

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — When James Johnson chose his research dissertation, the general feeling among that era’s academics was that it was ill-defined, elusive and a scientifically useless construct.

More than four decades later, Johnson remains gratified that he chose child play as his line of research. An elaboration and diversification of so many different means of doing credible research on the subject and the acceptance of the hypothesis that play is a very important construct in child development was something Johnson always believed could happen when he was a graduate student at Wayne State University in Detroit in the 1970s.

He helped with systematic research at Wayne State on play of children ages 3 to 5 and he also found professors at different universities and attended conferences in the early 1970s about how certain forms of adult-guided play could help children in their early development.

A professor of education since 1983 and for 31 years professor-in-charge of early childhood education in the Penn State College of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Johnson said child play was known early in his career as the Ugly Duckling of educational behavioral sciences because it seemed too vague a concept and hard to define in research.

“But some of us thought that it's not an ugly duckling but a beautiful swan,” he said. “That's proven to be the case, but I didn't realize that at the time; it was more of a gut-level feeling that it has to be important. I was the oldest of five children growing up and I had a lot of experiences directly as a child and I just knew how important it is.”

Play, according to Johnson, is a state of mind. “And it’s also a behavior. There are 156 definitions of 'play' in the Oxford Dictionary, so it’s unwieldy,” he said. “It’s an essential ingredient in life, right up there with loving and working. A harmonious theory of play is that you have to balance working, loving and playing.”

Today, if older people are asked to describe their play when they were a child, they admit it was a very important part of their lives, according to Johnson. “I just know that it helped with my mental and social/emotional development and creativity and imagination, so I think there was a lot of intuition that was really important,” Johnson said. “But it was very difficult to find empirical methods that could systematically research it. And that is still a difficult problem. But there's more openness, I think, to pursuing research.”

He said the Society for Research and Child Development is having a conference in St. Louis in April that's devoted to play, imagination and creativity. “That's really encouraging and I think some of our funding agencies are about ready to consider directly funding research on play, and it hasn't always been that way,” Johnson said.

“And when you do turn to the humanities and qualitative research methods, and they're considered credible research, there's more acceptance of the hypothesis that play is a very important construct in child development.”

Johnson said many universities have crossed the educational landscape, both colleges of education as well as colleges of Health and Human Development, to offer early childhood education programs, and that it is fairly common to see play pedagogy or play as an educative process.

Research by the LEGO Foundation as well as research about the long-running children’s show “Sesame Street” has shown that play prepares the brain for lifelong well-being, makes the whole family happier, nurtures empathy and resilience, and helps children cope with change.

“Professors like myself are also teaching graduate seminars over the years on play and human development in cultural variation. It's been common in that way to see the growth of the study of play and the uses of play. Now it's getting very common to see it in other countries,” he explained.

Johnson’s research has taken him around the world, and he presented in November in Guyana as another effort to reach out to low- and middle-income nations. He and his wife, Karen McChesney Johnson, assistant teaching professor of education (early childhood education), have journeyed to Taiwan, China, Japan, Turkey and Poland, among others.

“It's worldwide what's happening now, so that’s exciting, and low/middle-income countries like Guyana are really pursuing this and there's funding for this now,” he said. “It's been gratifying to see how things have really changed over time in favor of better appreciation for play and how you could study it and incorporate it into mental health practices and educational practices.”

Johnson is lead co-editor on the special theme of play during times of stress and adversity in the November 2021 and February 2022 issues of the “International Journal of Play.” It features empirical research articles on play and resiliency as a way of coping under stressful conditions. Studies and perspectives come from countries that include Myanmar, Finland, Iran, Israel, Jamaica and the United States, among others.

“There has always been the acceptance and the understanding that play not only has value for education and mental development, but also social-emotional well-being,” he said. “There are paradigms about play and healing and play and flow experiences or the psychology of optimal functioning. I think it has been around that we do appreciate play as important for emotional survival.”

Johnson said one of the issues that came up was the application and the dissemination and how to help people in general learn more about the topic. “It's only as good as you're getting the message across. The difficulties become communication, collaboration and being sensitive to differences because we have so many different family groups that vary by their educational levels, income levels and occupational levels, not to mention all the diversity with ethnicity.”

The field of child play, Johnson said, has stood the test of time because it’s a part of human existence. “People are trying to understand better why play is so necessary in human development and also in evolution. And so that that becomes fascinating,” he said. “We're learning so much so fast. I just hope I can be helpful in continuing this and passing it along and take it even further. It (play) is just part of the human spirit to happen and so I can see that just going on and on; it’s part of who we are.”

Continuing to be part of young people's lives and young families’ lives, Johnson’s empirical work remains very rewarding to him.

“It's just it's just very gratifying to do this sort of work and indirectly touch the future generations from my teachers and the teacher educators and everybody I've been able to work on this with,” he said. “Even though it's billed as early childhood education, that there's an appreciation for just how important playfulness is for individuals and families across the life course and intergenerationally.”