Community Connections
By enriching the lives of students, we hope our Education students share their skills to improve their schools, neighborhoods, and communities. This page shares ways for you to become involved in the Education community and highlights some of our community-based programs.
Connect with Education Alumni Community
The GVSU Education Alumni Network actively gives back to the community and the university. Alumni meet three times a year at GVSU to talk with current students about trends in education and review students' cover letters and resumes. The alumni also volunteer at student move-in, homecoming, and StoryTime in the Park, and assist with projects for Community Outreach Week.
Mentor Future Teachers
The Education programs have strong partnerships with in-service teachers who are committed to sharing their expertise by serving as mentors to our 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 Education programs to receive more information about being a Mentor Teacher:
Explore Community-based Projects
Groundswell Stewardship Initiative
Groundswell is a coalition of community partners creating opportunities for hands-on environmental learning in West Michigan. The program supports P-12 educators who want to move beyond the classroom walls and teach students by exploring their communities.
Storytime in the Park
Storytime in the Park turns summer reading into a weekly ice cream social. Led by GVSU since 2009, the program provides new, high-quality books free of charge to children birth-17.
Michigan Literacy Project
The Michigan Literacy Projects’s mission is to provide quality classroom libraries to recent GVSU graduates teaching 3 years or less in PreK-6 classrooms in underserved Michigan public school districts and GVSU charter schools across the state.
Project Based Learning
A partnership between GVSU and PBLWorks allows GVSU students to learn and implement high-quality project-based learning. GVSU teacher interns 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
Our college 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.
CECI BCPS Partnership for Educational Transformation
GVSU’s College of Education and Community Innovation has a long-standing partnership with Battle Creek Public Schools. Since 2019, through teacher preparation programs and community partnerships made possible by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, we are helping new teachers thrive in the district and BCPS graduates succeed in college.