Joelle Quoirin

Director

About Us

The mission of La Petite Ecole is to educate young children in a foreign language to make them better citizens of tomorrow’s world.  We operate as an non-for-profit corporation. It is overseen by a Board of Directors.

 

Joëlle Quoirin, the director of La Petite Ecole, taught preschool at La Petite Ecole in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Although La Petite Ecole in Columbia is modeled after this school in Virginia, the schools are in no way affiliated; each school is directed and operates independently.  Joëlle Quoirin is a native speaker of French, who grew up in Belgium and was educated in the U.S.  She holds a Master of Arts degree in French (M.A.L.T.) and further pursued an Educational Specialist degree in Foreign Language Teaching (Curriculum & Instruction) from the University of Missouri at Columbia.  She has eleven years of teaching experience in both French and Spanish with children as young as three and seniors as old as eighty.  Joëlle is also the mother of two bilingual (French and English) preschoolers.

 

“I have taught French and Spanish for several years to children and adults alike.  I have to say that the greatest success I have experienced as a foreign language educator has been with young children.  Preschoolers not only learn effortlessly and without the anxiety most older learners associate with learning a foreign language, but when spoken to exclusively in the target language, they are also able to replicate a native speaker’s accent.  That is simply amazing to me!”