Jane P. Perry

Jane Perry is the research coordinator and a preschool teacher at the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center at the University of California, Berkeley. As the research coordinator, she administers and supervises projects conducted by faculty and students from accredited institutions. Research she has supervised include studies related to language acquisition, phonetic development, and learned behaviors amongst the preschool children. Additionally, Perry advises and trains graduate students on research protocols prior to beginning their work at the Jones Child Study Center. As a researcher and teacher Perry acts as a liaison between teachers, students, parents, and staff regarding research issues conducted at the site. She coordinates the procedures for testing children attending the preschool and organizes presentations by the researchers of current projects at the Child Study Center for the parents whose children attend the school.
Perry received her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley and her M.A. from the School of Education at the University of Minnesota. Her work addresses the ways in which the outdoors offers children opportunities to develop creativity and imagination without explicit thematic structure to their activities. Perry argues that independent outdoor play in early education is crucial for the child's development of selfhood in learning how to navigate independently later in life, especially before the children experience the formal structure of the education system.
In school, the playground is where children go to make sense of their world. The playground is also a place that allows adults to focus on children's developmental issues specifically because the interactions are directed by the children. With the guidance of the teachers, children learn communication skills to negotiate their interests or to express their emotions. From the peer culture perspective, Perry focuses on the social skills among children that are cultivated as they begin to identify one another as a group distinct from the adults in their lives. Perry analyzes play interactions from the perspective of the children as they seek out their peers for friendship and feelings of control and accomplishment. She has observed that children interact in ways that demonstrate shared comprehension of fantasy play, friendships, ceremony and etiquette.
In addition to acknowledging the dynamics of the peer culture, the teacher is responsible for strategically setting up distinct physical areas to present physical and social cues for thematic play. Consequently the children will direct the activities within the ecology through invention and reformulation of meanings. Perry asks, "What are they learning out of doors that they could not learn inside?" Her research has found that children use natural materials like dirt, woodchips, sand, and leaves to follow their own inventiveness in a large space that allows them to use their whole bodies to explore, plan and carry out their plan without restrictions of noise and space.
As a researcher in the classroom, Perry employs the ethnographic method as a participant observer to identify and advocate the complex learning processes that take place on the school playground and in literacy development from the point of view of the peer culture. Her ongoing studies have found that learning occurs in a negotiated process between peer and teacher cultures. She utilizes qualitative evidence to convey the complexity of children's pretend play through initiation, negotiation, and enactment, and the role of decision-making processes of the teacher in promoting complex learning outdoors.
More recently, Perry's research expands on negotiated teaching and learning processes to look at children's dictated narratives. Perry uses children's narratives to access peer-derived play themes in the development of literacy and perspective-taking. Perry examines how children develop the ability to construct narratives, such as recounting an event or telling a story. She collects dictated narratives as a strategy to elicit a child's developing linguistic capacity while making sense of their world, both of which are culturally defined by specified norms.

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