Professor Aurore Mroz and two PhD students, Macha Petre and Scarlet Peterson, presented an innovative public engagement project, Le Cercle Francophone (The Francophone Circle), at the Chancellor's Inaugural Public Engagement Summit at UIUC on December 13. Their presentation was featured among multiple outreach initiatives in the local community across many subfields of the humanities, social, life, behavioral, computational, and engineering sciences.

The Cercle was initiated more than two years ago by Professor Mroz and other volunteer educators of French, to increase children's and parents' engagement with French in our local community. The once-a-week Saturday morning initiative directed to children from age 6 to 11 grew into a 3-year-long innovative public engagement project. The Cercle’s goal is to develop and maintain French English bilingualism and biliteracy in Francophone and Francophile children in the community through a series of two-hour-long sessions of fun pedagogical activities in French. Scheduled to happen for four consecutive Saturdays each semester at the public library, these sessions are organized and animated by faculty members, graduate and undergraduate students, and K-6 dual-immersion teachers.