Patrick Sullivan, Darin Jensen, and Christie Toth are the founders of Teacher-Scholar-Activist.
Patrick Sullivan teaches English at Manchester Community College, in Manchester, Connecticut. He is the author of “The Two-Year College Teacher-Scholar-Activist,” which was published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College (NCTE) in 2015.
Patrick is the co-editor, with Howard Tinberg, of What Is “College-Level” Writing? (NCTE, 2006) and, with Howard Tinberg and Sheridan Blau, of What Is “College-Level” Writing? Volume 2: Assignments, Readings, and Student Writing Samples (NCTE, 2010). He is also the author of A New Writing Classroom: Listening, Motivation, and Habits of Mind (Utah State University Press, 2014). Patrick has also edited, with Howard and Sheridan, Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom (NCTE, 2017). He is also the author of a book about community colleges, Economic Inequality, Neoliberalism, and the American Community College (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
In addition to teaching and writing, Patrick enjoys running, biking, hiking, reading, and spending time with his family — his wife, Susan, his children, Bonnie Rose and Nicholas, and his granddaughter, Marigold Hope.
Darin Jensen teaches English at Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) in Iowa.
Darin’s writing has appeared in Composition Studies. He served on the Two-Year College Association task force which wrote the Guidelines for Preparing English in the Two-Year College. His writing will appear in TETYC, College English, and Writing on the Edge over the next several months.
Darin is the son of working-class parents and is a first-generation college student. He is passionate about the democratic mission of the two-year college. He is currently completing his dissertation on how graduate programs prepare two-year college professionals at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is also a co-founder of the Nebraska Developmental Education Consortium and has served on the advisory board of the Nebraska Writing Project.
Darin lives in Des Moines with his wife, Sara, his youngest son, two labs, and a cat. It is clear the cat is in charge.
Christie Toth is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing & Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. She researches and writes about a variety of issues related to two-year college writing instruction. She has taught writing courses at both two- and four-year institutions and she is currently collaborating with colleagues from Salt Lake Community College on a range of initiatives for transfer students. She has also served on several regional and national TYCA committees, including the research committees that wrote recent white papers on developmental education and writing placement reform and the task force that revised the Guidelines from Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College. These cross-sector institutional and professional collaborations are the basis for her current book project, which seeks to reimagine community college-university relations in the discipline of writing studies.
Christie’s scholarship has appeared in the journals Teaching English in the Two-Year College, College English, College Composition and Communication, Journal of Basic Writing, Assessing Writing, and Writing Program Administration, as well as in the forthcoming collections Class in the Composition Classroom and Writing Assessment and Social Justice. She and Patrick Sullivan co-edited the 2016 critical sourcebook Teaching Composition at the Two-Year College. Christie is passionate about forging a discipline in which two- and four-year institutions work together to fulfill the promise of open admissions for the diverse students who attend community colleges.
Christie has found that working with community college faculty and students has been a great way to connect with activism in her new hometown of Salt Lake City, and she is involved with several local social justice groups. She and her husband Ben also enjoy hiking the beautiful mountains and canyons of Utah.