Miss Josy's Playground
Professor Jennifer Jipson (PSY/CD) and friends sit on rocks on a grassy slope listening to ocean-like echoes in seashells they cup to their ears. Their reverie takes place in the recently redesigned Miss Josy’s Playground, the play area of the Child Development Learning Lab.
The hands-on learning environment around them features an interdisciplinary, sustainable play area that is also part of an innovative, inquiry-based pre-school program designed to provide students with tools that support and extend children’s existing skills and interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines.
Children are naturally motivated to explore and learn about their world through play. As they do so, they spontaneously engage with STEM content and processes. “I see the playground as a rich canvas for this kind of exploration and discovery,” Jipson says.
Numerous reports and initiatives currently focus on the inadequate STEM education provided by U.S. schools. Cal Poly is supporting efforts to produce nationwide, comprehensive reform in science and mathematics education from pre-school through postsecondary school. The redesign of Miss Josy’s Playground reflects one of the steps being taken by the Child Development program to contribute to this endeavor.
Upon learning of generous donations that the department received from Fran Durekas (HD) and an anonymous donor, Jipson jumped at the chance to coordinate the task of redesigning the outside lab play area, which had remained relatively unchanged since the late ’50s.
Beginning in 2008, Jipson and Durekas (founder of Children’s Creative Learning Centers, now a part of Knowledge Universe, a company that designs employee-sponsored child-care facilities and programs) collaborated with Professor David Watts (Landscape Architecture) and fellow CD faculty members in the renovation.
CD faculty view the playground as a “living” tool that will continually change in response to ongoing efforts to ensure a stimulating environment for children’s STEM learning. Each quarter, the CD students who serve as teachers in the pre-school lab leave their own marks on the playground’s design and use. In addition, multidisciplinary collaborations with Cal Poly engineering, animal science and computer science students bring new curricular and learning opportunities to the playground. One recent addition is a solar table that children can use to explore concepts related to renewable energy.
“The beautiful environment of the playground brings creative inspiration not only to the children who play there, but also to the lab students,” says Heather Jones (CD). “It was the motivation for my senior project, which was a huge success: I researched the benefits of outdoor pre-school environments. Then my senior project partner, advisor and I created a new design for the upper patio area, which is still waiting to be refurbished. I know that future CD and other Cal Poly students will also be encouraged to create exciting new curriculum and design ideas.”
The CLA and Psychology and Child Development Department are enthusiastic about the impact that this new outdoor space is having. On any given day, children can be seen poking around in the garden for bugs, checking on the growth of their flowers and vegetables, exploring decomposing logs, creating ideal mixes of sand and water for constructive play, building their own shade structures from blankets and poles, resting on lawn mounds watching the clouds—and rolling everything they can find (including themselves) down the slide and the hill.
Editor’s Note: Miss Josy’s Playground was named after Professor Josephine “Josy” Sterns, who was a faculty member in the program and taught child development courses at Cal Poly from 1969 until her death in 1992.