Betty Jones was born in San Francisco in 1930 and grew up in the East Bay as the only child of parents who had met in a hiking club. They went camping in the mountains a lot, exploring the wilderness. Her dad taught her trout fishing. At home, he shared his stamp collection. Her mom shared lots of music with her, and read her many books, creating a lifelong bookworm.

In college at University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., she explored many things, without a career goal. In her senior year in a psychology class, she discovered young children, got curious about them, and started watching them. She did that for the rest of her life—observing preschoolers and their environments, and the adults who care for them, and teaching those adults at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena.

She and Gil Jones married when they were 20, finished their bachelor’s degrees in the following year (Betty now with a psychology major,) and went off for two years of graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Betty enrolled in an interdisciplinary child development major, spent every day in the campus preschool, got a research assistantship, and was actively supported by her faculty advisors as she began to create herself as researcher, in a qualitative and open-ended model that emerged through observing, taking notes, discussing, reading, experimenting, and constructing theory. She completed an independent study in which she documented all the musical behavior initiated by children in the 3-year-old classroom during a semester.

With new degrees, Betty and Gil escaped Midwestern winters and went back to California—this time to Los Angeles. Betty’s advisor at the University of Wisconsin, Helen Dawe, referred Betty to a job opening at Pacific Oaks Friends School in Pasadena (“You’re a Quaker,” Helen pointed out. “They’ll want you.”) They did. Director Evangeline Burgess offered Betty a teaching job in the 4-year-old classroom, as well as living space at the school. Burgess became her friend and mentor.

However, before the move, Betty found herself pregnant and renegotiated her role. The preschool was starting a new teacher education program, which would be accredited as Pacific Oaks College. Betty became the school’s music specialist, working with children and taking notes on their play, teaching adults in the new teacher education program, and participating in grownups’ meetings and coming up with new ideas for projects of all sorts. Evangeline, who was on the national publications board of NAEYC, proposed that Betty create a book based on her observations and reflections on children’s informal play with instruments and singing and movement. Surprised and pleased, Betty agreed to this idea. “What IS Music for Young Children?” was published in 1958–the first of a lifetime’s documentation of her collaborative storytelling and reflective thinking about human development across the life cycle.

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Betty made many friends among colleagues and students during her years at Pacific Oaks, and most of her research and writing was collaborative. In 1960 when she and Elizabeth (Liz) Prescott met, they discovered that they each liked research on early childhood, that they each had a 6-year-old daughter, and that they liked each other. Liz was directing a project at the local Welfare Planning Council, gathering data for a directory of day care and nursery education in Los Angeles County. Betty joined her as co-author.

The War on Poverty was becoming a national movement, and Head Start began. The U.S. Children’s Bureau identified a need for data to evaluate the probable effectiveness of group care in meeting the developmental needs of young children. Liz was planning to submit a grant proposal, and Betty suggested that Liz identify its site as Pacific Oaks. It was funded, and Liz Prescott joined Pacific Oaks faculty as research director. Betty became her project associate on the research that followed over the next dozen years.

Their work together, disseminated in publications and presentations, extended through the 1990s. Some of it focused not on child care, but on observations of child and teacher behavior, and of the varied physical environments in which these behaviors took place. Pacific Oaks published a co-authored book, “Dimensions of Teaching-Learning Environments” (1984), using the observation tools created in these research projects and including extensive anecdotes collected in the process. It was aimed at a broad audience of teachers in preschool and primary school classrooms.

Much of Liz’s work involved formal data collection, designed to assess the effectiveness of programs and environments. Betty, who loved hanging out in preschool classrooms and taking notes on the spot, moved toward action research—consulting and designing staff development projects when invited by an organization with a grant. Betty had a great many opportunities over the years and around the world to visit early childhood programs and consult on their issues in staff development.

The most extended and intensive of these was right next door in the Pasadena Unified School District, which had several early childhood programs and received a five-year grant in the 1990s for an action research project with its staff: the Pasadena Partnership Project. The district approached Pacific Oaks Research Center in 1988; Betty invited herself into the role of research director and took the lead in designing and documenting an action research project. Through the project, teachers could invite an observer into their classrooms to observe children at play and create anecdotes to become part of a weekly newsletter that went to all teaching staff. This became a launchpad for the content of the monthly in-service and for extended voluntary activities for staff, including attending conferences and enrolling in the college. A book edited by Betty, “Growing Teachers: Partnerships in Staff Development,” was published by NAEYC in 1993. It collects stories from a variety of other programs—from the Rockies and Alaska to California and Australia—with which Betty had active contact over the years.

Betty often quoted Rudyard Kipling, whose “Just So Stories” her mother read to her as a child:

. . . But there was one Elephant
a new Elephant
an Elephant’s Child
who was full of ‘satiable curiosity,
and that means he asked ever so
many questions.

Betty explained, “He has been a role model for me ever since—an autobiographical context for my research and writing.” She asked, ‘How does one develop a life, in order to explore genuine questions, and collect stories and play with theories and participate in the social construction of knowledge?’

That is what Betty did. She went places and explored ideas and shared them in workshops and speeches at early childhood conferences and in articles and books. She wrote a lot, over the years, about something she called emergent curriculum. She invented that term while writing an introduction to a small book for NAEYC in 1970, “Curriculum Is What Happens: Planning Is the Key,” by Laura Dittman (ed). “My life has been emergent, rather than pre-planned,” she explained.

Betty wrote endlessly about play—play in childhood, play as a teacher, play as a parent, play from birth through old age. The Burgess lecture she gave at her retirement from Pacific Oaks faculty in 2010 (when she was 70), was called “Play Across the Life Cycle: From Initiative to Integrity to Transcendence,” and was published in Young Children in 2011.