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Community Connections
The College of Education's mission of "Teaching, Leading, and Learning in a Democratic Society" underscores our commitment to educating students to be responsible community members. By enriching the lives of students, we hope they share their skills to improve their schools, neighborhoods, and communities. This page shares ways for you to become involved in the COE community and highlights some of our community-based programs.
Connect with COE Alumni Community
The GVSU College of Education Alumni Association is active in giving back to the community and the university. Alumni meet three times a year at GVSU to talk with students about current trends in education and to review students cover letters and resumes. The alumni also volunteer at student move-in, homecoming, Story Time in the Heights, and assist with projects for Community Outreach Week.
Mentor Future Teachers
The College of Education has strong partnerships with in-service teachers who are committed to sharing their expertise by serving as mentors to COE students. Our students come prepared with high-quality skills and strategies to use in your classroom and can provide another qualified set of hands to assist with student instruction.
Contact the COE to receive more information about being a Mentor Teacher:
Explore COE's Community-based Projects
Battle Creek Partnership
The partnership between Battle Creek Public Schools and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation provides new, innovation opportunities for COE students, as well as Battle Creek teachers and their students. COE students who student teach in Battle Creek Public Schools receive full tuition during student teaching, as well as stipends towards cost of living and textbooks.
Groundswell
Groundswell is a coalition of community partners creating opportunities for hands-on environmental learning in West Michigan. This program supports preK-12 educators who want to move beyond the classroom walls and teach students through exploring their own communities.
Storytime GR
Storytime GR strives to create a more equitable educational landscape by providing new, high-quality books free of charge to children birth-17.
Project Based Learning
A partnership between the COE and PBLWorks provides opportunities for COE students to learn and implement high-quality project based learning. COE student teachers receive PBL training alongside their mentor teachers and then engage in a year-long project with students in their classroom. Watch this PBL Journey video to hear about the experiences of past participants.
Kids' Food Basket
The COE collects loose change as part of an ongoing fundraising drive to support the Kids’ Food Basket, a local organization that provides evening meals to children in the Grand Rapids region. Faculty and staff also decorate brown-paper lunch bags with inspirational messages and designs. These bags are used to distribute more than 6,000 sack suppers each day.
Michigan Literacy Project
The Michigan Literacy Projects’s mission is to provide quality classroom libraries to recent College of Education graduates teaching 3 years or less in PreK-6 classrooms in an underserved Michigan public school districts and GVSU charter schools across the state.