Danelle Mosher and Marci Harris have been french traveling best friends since the beginning. Both French teachers are here at Community, but their teaching skills go way further than the walls of our building . Every year, they take their French 2, 3 and 4 students on an immersive trip to France or Quebec. They want their students to get as excited about the language as they are.
“There are tons of opportunities to be tourists and travel,” Harris says. “But we wanted students to actually stay with a family and experience the culture of what it’s like to live with the family, to go to a school, and to use the language as much as possible.”
For Harris and Mosher, their goal is to get their students as excited about the language as they are. This is not only an opportunity to travel, but an opportunity to use and practice their skills firsthand.
“Using the language, finding somebody to talk to. I’m not always there with them,” Moser says. “But the excitement on their face when they come back and they say, ‘I just had a whole conversation with a person.’ Even if they didn’t understand every single word of it, you know, then they respond, and so I think that’s the most fun of all.”
This past summer was not the first trip for these two; Harris and Moser have been running the trip together since 2020. Before Community, they had been taking students on these educational trips through other schools and programs for years. However, the origin of the Homestay idea for Community students isn’t as clear to them.
After only taking two French classes in high school, Tracy Anderson found herself teaching French with Liz Stern at Community. Together, they attended a conference in Minneapolis where they discovered a non-profit organization called Exparitas. Anderson was able to pass the French teaching test and earn her certification because of her own immersion experience of living in France for seven months, so she was immediately interested.
“When we found the company,” Anderson said. “We were like, ‘we’re gonna do that, if we’re gonna teach French, then we’re gonna take kids to Paris.”
Expiritas is a program designed to help organize students with all the information they need to travel safely and successfully, from booking tickets at tourist attractions to a on-hand help working in the city. Still even after being able to re visit familiar places, the journey is still very unexpected and complicated. It’s no breeze to fly 30 kids to France.
“It’s very stressful, but it’s a good stress,” Harris says. “I just believe in it so much. I believe that, if you’re going to study a language, and you can go to countries where the language is spoken and the culture is different, I just think it’s a great opportunity. So it’s worth the stress and the responsibility.”
“I just I feel like Danelle is the one who can calmly speak in French to problem solve.” Harris said. “Where I kind of freak out more, She’s calm, cool and collected. Her French is good in those situations where I’m all over the place. So we have a lot of fun together.”
Every year, Moser and Harris travel with students to either the 1st or 2nd largest French-speaking city in the world, together.
“ [We’ll] always be on call and always ready to be available to the students,” Moser said. “But, you know, we also have so much fun together, and that’s really lucky for us that that all works out.”
