A small group at Loyola’s Play Therapy Center are turning a room full of toys into child research, after the International Association for Play Therapy accredited the center in July.
LeAnne Steen, interim director for the Department of Counseling, oversees the recently approved program. Though they are not teaching a play therapy class or conducting their own research this semester, Steen and a graduate student are running the center by compiling research about play therapy this fall.
The Play Therapy Center is under the larger counseling department. Steen created it over the summer after teaching play therapy classes for several years. The center is only for research, and although many Loyola students and faculty volunteer their children to participate, it does not function as a therapy clinic.
Since young children don’t always have the ability to express complex emotions or problems, they are put in a familiar play environment with toys in order to express themselves and so professionals can diagnose the problem, Steen said.
“If you think back to when you were a kid and you would have a bad day, you would just go off and play by yourself for a little while — that was the way that you processed things,” Steen said. “This is just taking that to another level. You’re involving a therapist who is facilitating that play and responding to the different feelings they are seeing in the moment.”
The department has been growing since Hurricane Katrina, when Steen began play therapy research with children in the New Orleans area coping with the stress and trauma from the storm. She published an article about it that ran last July, and between the attention from the article and the accreditation from the association, people all over the country have expressed interest in getting involved at Loyola.
“People are deciding to come back and get their master’s in counseling,” she said.
The center has committed to writing and publishing more play therapy research in the future, Steen said. There is a point system in place for every piece of research the center produces. For instance, a published journal article is worth more points than a published book about their research. The Association for Play Therapy will review the center’s growth every three years. For certification, APT expected the center to accumulate six points, but the next evaluation will have a higher standard of 12 points in order to keep the certification.
Loyola will host the annual Louisiana Association for Play Therapy conference for the fourth consecutive year this spring, Steen said. Play therapists come from all over the state to hear speakers and discuss the issues and interests of their field.
Hasani Grayson can be reached at hkgrayso
