MCC Professor Sullivan Edits Book on Best Practices in Teaching

MANCHESTER, Conn.  (January 5, 2021) –Manchester Community College Professor of English Patrick Sullivan recently released his latest book on the value of a community college education.

Pat Sullivan

Sixteen Teachers Teaching (University Press of Colorado, 2020), edited by Sullivan, provides a look into the classrooms and teaching practices of sixteen distinguished two-year college English professors, according to the publisher.

Approximately half of all basic writing and first-year composition classes are now taught at two-year colleges, so the perspectives of English faculty who teach at these institutions are particularly valuable to the profession.

The book demonstrates how a group of acclaimed teachers put together their classes, design reading and writing assignments and theorize their work as writing instructors. The spotlighted teachers have spent their careers teaching numerous sections of writing classes each semester or term, so this book presents readers with an impressive – and perhaps unprecedented – abundance of pedagogical expertise, teaching knowledge and classroom experience.

Sullivan, a resident of Canterbury, has been teaching at MCC for more than 30 years, with expertise in composition scholarship and theory. He is the 2011 recipient of the Nell Ann Pickett Service Award for outstanding service to the two-year college. He is the author of A New Writing Classroom (University Press of Colorado, 2014) and Economic Inequality, Neoliberalism, and the American Community College (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) He holds master’s degrees in English and Liberal Arts from the University of Connecticut and Wesleyan University respectively, a bachelor’s degree from Eastern Connecticut State University and – a credential he places a lot of personal emphasis on – an associate degree from Mohegan Community College (now named Three Rivers).

Sullivan also edited, with Howard Tinberg and Sheridan Blau, Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom (NCTE 2017), which was awarded the 2019 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for Edited Collection.

“I began my academic career at a community college, and I try to give something back every day,” Sullivan said. “Sixteen Teachers Teaching is the latest product of research into how these important institutions of higher education enable people to do beautiful things with their lives.”