The National Youth Service Learning Conference is this week (April 6-9) in Atlanta, Georgia and I will be here soaking up as much as I possibly can over the next few days. There are so many great things about being here already, besides the obvious - it's about 20 degrees warmer than Michigan. So far, the Welcome Celebration last night featured good old southern cuisine (succotash, grits, fried chicken, BBQ sandwiches, fried okra) and brought together literally thousands of service learning advocates and practitioners to network and enjoy themselves. Today we workshop.

Last week I attended a Learn & Serve - Michigan Service Learning Sustainability Symposium with some colleagues. The symposium was intended for K-12 educators and service learning coordinators, but I was ecstatic to go as a representative from higher education because there was so much great information getting spread around!

There is some confusion about the definitions of community service and service learning. The term service learning gets thrown around quite a bit, an educational buzz word at times used to describe virtually anything that involves some type of service to the community. But what are the actual differences?

The Dean of the College of Education at Grand Valley State University holds a Professional Advisory Council (PAC) meeting every two years, inviting superintendants and principals from the tri-county area to help the College of Education with feedback about pre-service teachers. This year’s focus was on service-learning, and as an added bonus, all who participated were able to be a part of a workshop/presentation by international service-learning consultant Cathryn Berger Kaye.