Introduction to Ethnic Studies
Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com
This is a complete course: fifteen instructional weeks and a finals week, every student component, built with The Course Maker and ready to import. Weeks are relative (Week 1 to Week 16); you set the dates when you import it. Browse the whole thing below. Click any piece to read it in full, then click back to return here.
Nothing here is locked behind a signup. The course is the proof.
Download this course
This course is free, complete, and evergreen, and it is yours to keep; free downloads run through June 30, 2028. Students pay $0 for course materials: the readings and videos are links to freely available resources.
Pick the number of instructional weeks in your term; exam weeks sit on top of them. An edition marked “coming soon” is not built yet: asking for it tells us to build it, and we email you when it is ready.
This edition is built, and its download opens soon. Ask for it and we will email you when it is ready.
Get notified when the 15-week pack is ready — by email.
Enter your email address and we will let you know when this edition of the Introduction to Ethnic Studies course is ready to download, as a zip with the course cartridge (.imscc) and the instructor pack. No account and no password.
Before you import, read the import guide. Every pack is provided under the Sample Course License: use it and change it in any course you teach; do not redistribute it.
Want this course on your term's calendar and aligned to your institution's course outline and learning outcomes? The Course Maker builds custom editions, each with an alignment report designed to support program review and accreditation. Learn more: thecoursemaker.com
What the paid build adds
This sample is complete and yours to keep. A paid build is the same course made yours in the ways a download cannot be:
- Every date set to your term and your breaks, and re-paced to a second campus calendar at no extra charge.
- Your syllabus, your policies, and your outline of record in the build, with an alignment report that shows which component addresses each objective and SLO, and a Universal design for learning section drawn from the course's own data.
- Your name on every page as the course's creator.
- Kept current every term: fresh assessment variants, every link re-checked and the dead ones replaced, and the subject brought up to date where it has moved.
- The full instructor pack: answer keys and worked solutions, the alignment report, and the UDL map.
- A record for your college's file: the design attestation, a disclosure statement for every edition, and what changed at the end of each term.
Included in every course
ChapterRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee.
Slide deck with speaker notesRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — a slide deck with speaker notes, a chapter to read, and captioned videos — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee.
Captioned video linksRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — captioned videos, a chapter to read, and a slide deck with speaker notes — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee. We link videos only when a caption track exists (from the creator or generated automatically), and we never host them.
Like what you see? Build your own.
Give The Course Maker your topic and term dates, approve the plan, and download a complete Canvas course like this one — paced to your calendar and owned by you. $349 founding rate through June 2028 ($499 list).
Policies, schedule, and grading
Assignment groups & weights
Configured in the export — the gradebook is set the moment the course is imported.
| Assignment group | Weight | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tutorials & Practice | 10% | |
| Quizzes | 10% | |
| Workshops | 20% | |
| Assignments | 25% | |
| Discussions | 15% | |
| Exams | 20% | |
| Total | 100% | Letter Standard |
What students will be able to do
Explain what ethnic studies is and how it works: its origins in the 1968-1969 student strikes, the questions it asks, its interdisciplinary methods, its four core fields and the comparisons among them, and the role of positionality in reading evidence.
Define and distinguish the course's core concepts: race, ethnicity, and nationality; racialization and racial formation; ethnocentrism; prejudice, individual and institutional discrimination, and structural inequality; and intersectionality as distinct from adding identities together.
Compare theories of belonging (assimilation, cultural pluralism, segmented assimilation, internal colonialism, and double consciousness) as frameworks with named authors and named critics, and distinguish immigrant from colonized or incorporated peoples.
Analyze Native American and Indigenous experiences: tribal sovereignty as a political status, treaties, removal, allotment, boarding schools, termination and relocation, self-determination, repatriation, and survivance, using settler colonialism as a framework.
Analyze African American experiences from slavery through emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the civil rights and Black freedom movements, reading the laws and court decisions that shaped them.
Analyze Chicana/o and Latina/o experiences, from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo through the Bracero Program, the courts, the Chicano movement, and Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Central American experiences, and explain who uses which group term.
Analyze Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences, from exclusion and the naturalization cases through the incarceration of Japanese Americans and redress, the 1965 law, the Asian American movement, the model-minority image and its critique, refugee resettlement, and Native Hawaiian history.
Trace immigration, citizenship, and belonging across groups through the naturalization and immigration laws from 1790 to 1986, Arab American and Middle Eastern and North African experiences, and the federal categories from 1977 to 2024, taught as the issuing body's categories.
Apply intersectionality across gender, class, language, religion, and multiracial identity, compare movements and coalitions across groups, and synthesize the course through a community history that sets oral accounts beside the documented record.
Community history analysis: read a public record or an oral-history account for what it says, who made it, whom it affected, and what it leaves out; set it beside the documented law or event it belongs to; trace one law, movement, or concept across two or more groups; and state the reading in one plain sentence.
Evidence, respect, and evenhandedness: use group terms as members of the group most commonly use them and say who uses which; state documented history plainly while presenting contested current questions only as named debates; verify every claim about a real person, law, or date, including AI output, against an issuing-body or primary source; and reflect honestly on how one's own position shapes a reading.
How this course is built — read this first
Every teaching module carries the same set, in the order a student meets it: a Start Here overview, the chapter (the primary reading), the lecture (titled “Lecture: <module title>”), the slide deck with speaker notes, readings & resources (links only), the lecture tutorial and practice exercises worked with an AI tutor, the quiz, the discussion and the assignment, and the weekly Community History Workshop. Exams: the midterm in Week 8 and the final in Week 16, a finals week with no module.
The discussion and the assignment each ship in both formats: the adaptive version is the published, graded item, and its traditional alternative (no AI) is a separate item that ships unpublished beside it. An instructor who prefers the traditional format publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one.
What you see here is every student page. The instructor pack (answer keys and worked solutions, rubric calibration, image prompts, audio-brief scripts, and the alignment report) ships only in the download, never on this site.
Discussions & assignments: both formats in every module
Same learning objective either way; what changes is how the work happens.
Work it through with an approved chatbot
The student does the work in a guided conversation with an approved chatbot, using a copy-paste prompt the course provides. For a discussion, the AI is a Socratic partner that challenges their thinking and never writes the post. For an assignment, the AI is a coach: it asks questions, checks the reasoning shown, and waits for the student to revise. The student submits the chat link with the required summary or report.
The familiar way, one click away
The student does the work themselves and submits it, and the instructor grades it against the rubric. No AI required. It ships unpublished, opening with a one-line note to the instructor; publish it instead of the adaptive version if you prefer.
Every week, every component
Each week is a heading; every component under it links to the full student page. Week 8 is a teaching module that also carries the midterm bundle; Week 16 is the finals week, with the final exam bundle and no module.
What Ethnic Studies Is
Core Concepts: Race, Ethnicity, and Racialization
Theories of Belonging
Indigenous Nations, Sovereignty, and Settler Colonialism
Indigenous Survivance and Self-Determination
African American Experiences I: Slavery, Emancipation, and Jim Crow
African American Experiences II: Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movements
Midterm Review & Exam
The midterm exam bundle