Editorial »

josephjoseph   Junior Editor

Joseph Kirby is the owner and lead teacher of Wildwood Nature School, a play-based preschool. He has been an educator for fifteen years, teaching toddlers through adults in a variety of settings. He started his career teaching in public elementary schools before serving as School Partnership Director for a non-profit consulting organization working with schools in low-income communities. Joseph was an educator at a well-regarded children's museum, supervising programs for children under 5. In addition to creating programs for the museum floor, he created and delivered parent-child art, music, and science workshops for toddlers and preschoolers and outreach programs with nonprofit partners such as Head Start and the United Way. In his various positions, he has trained Americorps workers and college-aged museum staff on such topics as, "Learning Through Play," "The Stages of Infant Development," and "Teaching Writing to ESL Students." While a preschool teacher in an Even Start program, he conducted monthly parent education workshops on a variety of topics. Joseph's writing credits include a 10-week PeeWee Mariachi program combining music and language learning for toddlers and preschoolers; math, science, music, and art curricula for museum outreach programs; K-3 classroom guides for teachers to use in conjunction with school field trips to the children's museum; and a pre-K through grade 5 educational curriculum for a science and math-based exhibit that was sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Joseph earned an M.A in Education with a focus on issues of language, literacy, and race and learns more and more from the preschoolers in his care and his own young children every day.