Rate My Professor Rachel Brooks-Pannell

Rachel Brooks-Pannell is an Associate Professor of English at Columbus State Community College, where she has served in the Arts and Sciences division. She holds a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an M.A. from Ohio University. Her career at the institution includes progression from Instructor and Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, along with leadership roles such as Writing Center Coordinator in 2021 and Interim Chairperson of the English Department in 2025. She has contributed to college governance as a member of the Honors committee.

Brooks-Pannell has focused her academic interests on composition pedagogy, open educational resources, and student success strategies in writing and reading. As team lead for the Ohio Open Ed Collaborative, she developed the Second Year Writing Course Content in 2018, a full course aligned with Ohio Transfer Module English Composition II standards, covering rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking, research, genres, and writing in disciplines. She co-authored the Composition Reading Bank, an OER repository of freely available texts organized thematically for composition courses, featuring summaries and pedagogical examples; this resource earned Columbus State Community College a national Tech Impact Award. With Adam McKee, she created You Matter: Supporting Our Community through Reading, Writing, and More Success Strategies, an open-access textbook with chapters on reading processes, writing processes, rhetoric, style, and project structure. Collaborating with Whitney Larson, she developed the Third Space English Composition curriculum, designed to build classroom community through personal narratives, poems, and peer-reviewed writing projects emphasizing precise language and sensory details. She received the CCCC Chairs' Memorial Scholarship in 2006 while at Ohio University and has presented at conferences including MLA on anti-racist pedagogy, TYCA in 2026 with Adam McKee, and NCTE in 2024. Her work supports community college students through accessible, collaborative learning tools.