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Course syllabus

Introduction to Ethnic Studies — Syllabus

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition

Introduction to Ethnic Studies is a 3-unit, lower-division undergraduate course offered at [Institution] in [Term]. The class meets in person twice a week for about 75 minutes each time: [Meeting days/times].

This syllabus is the governing document for the course. It tells you what the course is, how your grade is built, what happens each week, and the policies you can count on. Weeks are numbered from Week 1 to Week 16; your instructor's course site gives the due date for each item.

Instructor and Contact

Instructor: [Instructor name]
Contact: [Contact info]
Office hours: [Office hours]

Bring something specific to office hours, such as a record whose reading keeps stalling at "what it leaves out", a scenario you cannot decide how to sort, or a law you are not sure how to place on the timeline. Reach out early: a question asked in the week it comes up is far easier to answer than one saved for exam week. Some of the history in this course is hard to read, and it is normal to find it heavy. If a topic weighs on you, tell your instructor; asking for support is part of doing this work well. Check the course announcements at the start of each week.

Course Description

This is the introductory, one-semester, comparative ethnic studies course for the United States. It studies how race and ethnicity have been made, lived, and contested in this country, and it is open to students in every major with no prerequisite. The course is interdisciplinary: each week reads law, history, sociology, literature, and community voices together. It is not a history survey, not a sociology course, and not the study of one group. It is also not a course about blame. It studies how categories and inequalities were made, and how the people they affected answered.

You will work through four core fields: Native American and Indigenous studies, African American studies, Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. Arab American and Middle Eastern and North African experiences are met in the immigration week. Comparison and connection sit at the center: again and again you will set one law, movement, or concept beside a second group's documented experience and say what the comparison shows.

Every week practices one habit. You state an idea in plain words first, then attach the term, then show it in a documented law, case, or account. Every reading of a record or an account walks the same order: what it says, who made it, whom it affected, what it leaves out, and what a comparison with another group adds. The reading ends in one plain sentence that names the concept and its evidence.

The arc of the course

The course opens with what ethnic studies is and where it came from (Week 1): the student strikes of 1968 and 1969 at San Francisco State and Berkeley, the questions the field asks, its methods, and positionality, which is how your own background shapes what you notice. Next come the core concepts (Week 2), such as race, ethnicity, racialization, and the kinds of discrimination, and the theories of belonging (Week 3), from assimilation to double consciousness, each taught with its authors and its critics. Then the course takes the four core fields one at a time. Native nations come first (Weeks 4 and 5), because sovereignty, treaties, and settler colonialism set the ground on which every later story happens. African American experiences follow (Weeks 6 and 7), from slavery through the Reconstruction amendments, Jim Crow, the civil rights laws, and Black freedom movements.

Week 8 reviews the first half by the one distinction each topic asks for, adds one small piece of new material on oral history and testimonio as evidence, and holds the midterm. The second half turns to Chicana/o and Latina/o experiences (Weeks 9 and 10) and Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences (Weeks 11 and 12). Week 13 traces immigration, citizenship, and the federal categories across every group. Week 14 applies intersectionality across gender, class, language, religion, and multiracial identity. Week 15 compares movements and coalitions across groups and brings the whole course together. Week 16 holds the cumulative final.

What you will work with

One running community oral-history archive is studied all term. It is an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection, with seven pinned excerpts and five intake rules. No real library, narrator, or interview is described, and no excerpt is a real person's words. Each narrator is identified by role and decade only, such as a nurse who arrived in the early 1970s or a student who joined a walkout in the 1960s, and each excerpt is tied to the documented law or event it belongs to. You meet the archive in Week 1, read its excerpts as each one's topic arrives, read all seven once as sources in Week 8, and read the whole collection through every lens in Week 15.

Around the archive, the course works with a law-and-case timeline in which every year comes from the issuing body's own page, the federal categories as the issuing body wrote them in 1977, 1997, and 2024, an illustrative four-grade lending table that models how a rating rule produces unequal outcomes, a fifteen-scenario concept-sorting set, and cross-group threads that trace one law or kind of movement across several groups. The archive, the lending table, and the concept-sorting set are illustrative and are always labelled that way. Examples also come from forms, schools, workplaces and farms, neighborhoods, clubs, and campuses, and the people in them get roles, not names.

You will also read the field's frameworks with their authors, named with the year and the work on first mention: Du Bois (1903), The Souls of Black Folk, for double consciousness; Omi and Winant (1986), Racial Formation in the United States, for racial formation; Crenshaw (1989), "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex", for intersectionality; Portes and Zhou (1993) for segmented assimilation; Blauner (1969) for internal colonialism; and Wolfe (2006) for settler colonialism as an ongoing structure. Each is a tool for reading evidence, not a description of every member of a group.

Our approach: respect and evenhandedness

Respect and evenhandedness carry weight in this course, and they work in four ways.

Documented history is stated plainly. Laws, court decisions, executive orders, treaties, removals, incarceration, segregation, and violence are documented facts. The course states them as facts. It never stages them as debates, never softens them, and never presents them as a justified necessity.
Frameworks are frameworks. Assimilation, cultural pluralism, segmented assimilation, internal colonialism, double consciousness, racial formation, settler colonialism, and intersectionality are taught with their authors and, where a real scholarly debate exists, with their critics. For example, classic assimilation theory is criticized for treating one Anglo-American core as the standard and for assuming that every group follows one immigrant path, and scholars question how far the colonial comparison in internal colonialism fits.
Contested current questions are not argued. Questions such as affirmative action after the Supreme Court's 2023 decision, reparations, immigration enforcement, school curriculum legislation, and team mascots appear, if at all, only as a named debate with each side's strongest case and no verdict. The same holds for any foreign conflict. No living politician, party, outlet, or commentator appears in the course, and no living activist is quoted.
People are named as they name themselves. Groups are named as their members most commonly name themselves, and where terms differ, the course says who uses which. For example, Hispanic and Latino are the federal terms, Chicana/o is a self-chosen political identity that rose with the 1960s movement, and Latinx and Latine are newer gender-inclusive forms whose use is debated. The course says "enslaved people", uses "incarceration" for the wartime removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans, and speaks of Native nations in the present tense, because they exist today.

No grade depends on which view you hold on a contested question. Your grade depends on reading the record accurately, describing each side of a real debate fairly, placing a law or event correctly in time, and supporting what you conclude with evidence.

Required Materials

You buy no textbook and pay nothing for course materials. Every reading and video is a link to an external resource, opened from the week's page so you always reach the version the course teaches from. Beyond a web browser, you need these free tools:

A notebook or any free note-taking app: for reading a record and for oral-history notes, which identify a narrator by role and decade, never by name.
A free spreadsheet: Google Sheets or any free spreadsheet, for the lending table's rates and gaps. Every step is spelled out, and every Community History Workshop also gives a route that needs no spreadsheet.
Any free timeline tool, or a hand-drawn timeline: for placing laws, cases, and events in time.
Free issuing-body sources: the laws, court decisions, categories, and dated events the course uses come from the issuing body's own pages, such as the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Census Bureau. You open each one from its link; none costs anything.
A free account with one approved AI chatbot, from the list in the AI-Use Policy below. A free tier is enough for everything in this course, and every AI-based activity also has a route that needs no AI at all.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course you will be able to:

Outcome A. 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.
Outcome B. 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.

The nine course objectives below build toward those two outcomes. Each week's overview page names the objective that week serves and turns it into a short checklist of what you should be able to do by the end of the week.

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.

How this course works

Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so you can choose how to take it in. Each module's lecture page also carries the week's explanation as one spoken-style walk-through.

A typical week runs in this order:

Week overview. Open the module's overview page, titled "Week N Overview" (for example, Week 1 Overview). It lists the week's work in order with time estimates and names the week's checkpoint, the one thing you should be able to do by the end of the week.
Chapter (about 30 to 55 minutes; each chapter prints its own time). The week's primary reading, where each idea moves from plain words to the term to a documented case. Read it first.
Lecture page and slide deck (about 15 to 20 minutes for the lecture, plus time with the deck). The same ideas, explained aloud and in slides.
Readings and videos. An optional go-deeper menu; every video has captions.
Lecture tutorial (60 to 90 minutes). A one-on-one session with your chatbot that teaches, gives practice, and ends with a completion summary you submit.
Practice set (15 to 25 minutes). Ungraded practice with a Socratic coach that asks questions, offers hints, and gives you a short self-check rubric for each problem, at your own pace and on fresh everyday scenarios.
Community History Workshop (about 90 minutes). One small piece of community history worked end to end. You read a public record, an archive excerpt, or a cross-group thread in the field's terms and place it in time, then set it beside a second group's documented experience. Next, you ask your chatbot to read the same source, check every claim it makes about a real person, law, or date, and catch and correct one of its slips by hand. You finish with a short reflection on what your own position let you see and miss.
Discussion (about 45 minutes) and assignment (60 to 90 minutes). Where you put the week's ideas to work on an arguable, applied question and on problems of your own.
Quiz. A short auto-graded check of what you now know, taken on your own.

Week 8 is lighter: the chapter (about 35 to 45 minutes), the lecture, slides, readings, practice set, and discussion, then the study guide, exam-prep tutorial, practice exam, and midterm. Week 16 has no new module; it holds the final exam and its study guide, exam-prep tutorial, and practice exam.

Grading

Your course grade is the weighted average of the six groups below. The weights sum to 100%.

Grading weight by assessment group
Component	Weight
Tutorials & Practice	10%
Quizzes	10%
Workshops	20%
Assignments	25%
Discussions	15%
Exams	20%
Total	100%

What each group holds

Tutorials & Practice: the 14 weekly lecture tutorials, one in every module except Week 8. The practice sets sit beside them and are ungraded.
Quizzes: 14 weekly quizzes, one in every module except Week 8. Quizzes are closed to AI.
Workshops: the 14 weekly Community History Workshops, one in every module except Week 8. Each Workshop publishes its rubric with it. The rubric rewards an accurate reading, correct placement in time, a fair comparison, a chatbot slip caught and corrected, and an honest reflection, never your opinion on a current policy question.
Assignments: 14 weekly assignments, one in every module except Week 8. Each assignment publishes its rubric with the assignment.
Discussions: 15 weekly discussions, one in every module from Week 1 to Week 15.
Exams: the midterm in Week 8 and the cumulative final in Week 16. Within this group, the final carries twice the midterm's weight.

Each week's discussion, and each week's assignment outside Week 8, ships in two versions. The adaptive version is published and graded by default. A traditional version that uses no AI is also in the module, unpublished; your instructor may publish it instead. An unpublished version does not appear to you and does not count. A published traditional version takes the adaptive one's place in the same group and counts the same.

Letter grades follow the standard scheme:

Letter grade by final course percentage
Letter	Percentage range
A	90–100
B	80–89
C	70–79
D	60–69
F	below 60

Weekly Schedule

The course runs for sixteen weeks: fifteen weeks of modules and a finals week. Every module from Week 1 to Week 15 holds the same materials: the week overview, the chapter, the lecture page (titled "Lecture:" followed by the module's title), the slide deck, the readings and videos page, and the practice set. Every module also ships both an adaptive discussion and a traditional no-AI alternative, and every module except Week 8 ships both an adaptive assignment and a traditional no-AI alternative. The adaptive versions are scheduled, graded, and published; the traditional alternatives are unpublished by default and count only if your instructor publishes them instead.

Module title, published graded work, and unpublished traditional alternatives by week
Week	Module	Graded and published	Traditional alternative (unpublished)
1	What Ethnic Studies Is	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
2	Core Concepts: Race, Ethnicity, and Racialization	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
3	Theories of Belonging	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
4	Indigenous Nations, Sovereignty, and Settler Colonialism	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
5	Indigenous Survivance and Self-Determination	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
6	African American Experiences I: Slavery, Emancipation, and Jim Crow	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
7	African American Experiences II: Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movements	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
8	Midterm Review & Exam	Adaptive discussion, midterm exam	Discussion
9	Chicana/o and Latina/o Experiences I: Conquest, Labor, and the Courts	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
10	Chicana/o and Latina/o Experiences II: Movements and Many Communities	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
11	Asian American and Pacific Islander Experiences I: Exclusion and Incarceration	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
12	Asian American and Pacific Islander Experiences II: Reopening, Movement, and the Pacific	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
13	Immigration, Citizenship, and Belonging Across Groups	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
14	Intersections: Gender, Class, Language, Religion, and Multiracial Identity	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
15	Movements, Solidarity, and the Course Synthesis	Tutorial, Community History Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
16	Finals week (no module)	Final exam	None

What each week asks of you

Week 1. Workshop: Checking a Draft Display on How the Field Began. Discussion: What Does a Record Leave Out? Assignment: A First Look at the Archive: Counts, Questions, and Positions.
Week 2. Workshop: Two Voices, Three Levels. Discussion: Which Level, Which Question? Assignment: Sort the Scenario, Read the Form: Core Concepts at Work.
Week 3. Workshop: One Picture, Two Voices. Discussion: Which Framework Fits? Assignment: Testing the Frameworks: A Framework-Fit Report.
Week 4. Workshop: Reading the Fort Laramie Treaty. Discussion: Where Should the Story of Native Nations Start? Assignment: Reading a Treaty, Placing a Removal: Native Nations on the Record.
Week 5. Workshop: A Community Center's Program Board. Discussion: The Record, the Voice, and an Island. Assignment: Still Here: Placing Survivance on the Timeline.
Week 6. Workshop: Checking an Exhibit's Captions. Discussion: A Proclamation, a Ruling, and a Train Car. Assignment: Equal on Paper: Reading Slavery, Emancipation, and Jim Crow on the Timeline.
Week 7. Workshop: A Lender's Log by Neighborhood. Discussion: Rulings, Riders, and the Bank's Map. Assignment: Different, Not Finished: Reading the Rules Behind Segregation.
Week 8. Discussion: What a Voice Can Prove. Then the midterm, taken on your own.
Week 9. Workshop: A Family-History Project's Ten Index Cards. Discussion: Conquest, Contract, and the Courts. Assignment: The Border Moved: Conquest, Contract, and the Courts on the Timeline.
Week 10. Workshop: A Neighborhood Exhibit on Many Roads. Discussion: Whose Word, Whose Strike? Assignment: Many Roads, One Federal Term: Movements and Communities on the Timeline.
Week 11. Workshop: Ten Labels in a Museum Case. Discussion: Two Papers and the Words We Use. Assignment: Two Papers: Exclusion, Citizenship, and Redress on the Timeline.
Week 12. Workshop: Three Roads in One Display. Discussion: One Name or Many? Assignment: Three Roads, Not One Story: Reopening, Movement, and the Pacific on the Timeline.
Week 13. Workshop: A Library Exhibit's Ten Family Papers. Discussion: Who Could Belong, and Who Decided. Assignment: Who Could Belong: Citizenship, Quotas, and the Federal Categories on the Timeline.
Week 14. Workshop: One Handbook, Many Lenses. Discussion: Where Do the Lines Meet? Assignment: Where Categories Meet: Intersections on the Timeline.
Week 15. Workshop: A Library Exhibit on Working Together. Discussion: Together, Not the Same. Assignment: Together, Not the Same: Coalitions, Apologies, and One Law Across Groups. Together they bring the course to a close: cross-group coalitions, community-engaged and public scholarship, apologies, redress, and repatriation compared across groups, and the archive's seven excerpts read through every week's lens, with one law or movement traced across two or more groups.

The midterm and the final

The midterm in Week 8 covers Objectives 1 to 5 as taught in Weeks 1 to 7. Week 8 itself reviews those weeks by the one distinction each topic asks for, such as race against ethnicity, prejudice against discrimination, immigrant against colonized or incorporated peoples, tribal sovereignty as a political status rather than a racial category, and de jure against de facto segregation. Its one piece of new material, oral history and testimonio as evidence, is worked in that week's chapter, practice set, and discussion.

The final in Week 16 is cumulative and draws on all nine course objectives. It gives the most weight to the second half of the course, Objectives 6 to 9 (Chicana/o and Latina/o experiences, Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences, immigration and citizenship across groups, and intersections, movements, and the synthesis), while still drawing on every first-half objective, Objectives 1 to 5. Both exams come with a study guide, a practice exam, and an exam-prep tutorial you work with your chatbot. Both are auto-graded, so every item is multiple choice, multiple answer, matching, ordering, or true/false, and any table an item uses is small and described in words.

Attendance and Participation

This course meets in person twice a week. Come to class having opened the week's overview page and read the chapter, because class time builds on that reading with records, accounts, and comparisons. Your participation also shows in your weekly work: the tutorial, the Community History Workshop, the discussion, the assignment, and the quiz. Each week builds on the ones before it (you cannot trace a law across two groups until you can read it for one), so falling a week behind is the most common reason a grade slips. Keep to the weekly rhythm, and talk to your instructor the moment a week stalls. If you must miss class, follow the week's module from its overview page so you stay on pace.

Late Work

Late work loses 10% of the item's credit for each day it is late. If something serious comes up, such as an illness or a family emergency, contact your instructor before the due date whenever you can so the two of you can agree on a fair plan. The penalty exists to keep the course moving, not to punish genuine hardship.

Academic Integrity

The work you submit must be your own, and you are bound by your institution's academic integrity standard. Do not copy another student's work, do not submit work you did not do, and do not misrepresent how a piece of work was produced. In a course built on the record, integrity also means honest evidence: every claim about a real person, law, or date traces to an issuing-body or primary source you can name, every quotation matches its source word for word, and the archive's excerpts are always treated as illustrative. Three violations matter most in this course: inventing a quotation, a statistic, an event, or a law, or crediting one to a real person, community, or government, including one a chatbot supplied; fabricating or doctoring a chatbot conversation or its share link; and using AI on the quizzes, the midterm, or the final. Violations are handled under your institution's academic integrity process and may result in no credit for the item.

Community history ethics

No graded work requires you to interview anyone. The course's consent script, introduced in Week 1, governs any optional live interview you do this term, and the rules are strict. You interview only one consenting adult, who has given a clear yes to the course's consent script, about a non-sensitive topic of the narrator's choosing, such as work, food, language, a tradition, or a neighborhood. You never ask about immigration or documentation status, citizenship, legal or criminal matters, health, or traumatic events. You record no name or identifying detail, and you make no audio or video recording. The narrator may skip any question or stop at any time.

Accessibility and Disability

This course is designed to reflect universal-design principles and offers multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression. If you have a disability and need an accommodation, contact your institution's disability services office to arrange it, and let your instructor know so it can be put in place promptly. If any material is hard to use with your assistive technology, tell your instructor and an equivalent version will be provided. Every table, timeline, and chart in the course, including any that a quiz or exam item refers to, is described in words as well as shown. This course is not yet accessibility-certified, and your feedback helps improve it. The course page Accessibility & Inclusion in Module 0 explains how the course offers multiple modes, how to turn on captions, and how to request an accommodation.

AI-Use Policy

This course uses an AI chatbot as a sparring partner, and then asks you to check its claims and correct its work by hand. Use any one of the approved chatbots: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, or Microsoft Copilot. Your instructor may edit this list. Free tiers are fine, and Copilot is often included with a campus Microsoft 365 account.

AI may be used on these activities:

Lecture tutorials (completed with a chatbot). Each week you work the tutorial in a conversation with an approved chatbot, then submit the conversation share link and your completion summary.
Practice sets (ungraded). You work the practice exercises with a chatbot coach that asks questions and offers hints.
Adaptive discussions (completed with a chatbot). You hold a real-time dialogue with an approved chatbot, then post the AI's summary with the conversation share link. This version does not require replies to classmates.
Adaptive assignments (AI-coached). You do your own work first, then work it through with a chatbot coach that scores it against the assignment's scoring criteria, and submit the self-scored report, your revised work, and the conversation share link. You remain the reader of the record: the coach asks questions and checks your work; it does not write your reading for you.
Community History Workshops (a pair-consult step and a required AI-critique step). After your own reading, you ask your chatbot to read the same source, and you check every claim it makes about a real person, law, or date against an issuing-body or primary source before trusting any of it. Then you catch and correct one of its slips by hand, such as describing a group as one uniform experience; presenting a stereotype or the model-minority image as fact; inventing a quotation, statistic, event, or law for a real person, community, or government; describing Native nations only in the past tense or as gone; framing a documented injustice as "both sides" or as justified necessity; presenting a contested current policy question as settled; misstating a law, a case, or a date; using an outdated term or a slur without comment; using race, ethnicity, and nationality interchangeably; presenting a census category as a biological fact; or writing a "neutral" summary that quietly takes a side.
Exam-prep tutorials and studying. Use AI freely to review, to check your understanding, and to prepare for the exams.

AI may not be used on the quizzes, the midterm, and the final. These are closed to AI and must be entirely your own work, because they confirm that you personally can define the course's distinctions, place a law or case in time, read the lending table, and sort a scenario by concept.

A chatbot is not a source. It can explain a term or quiz you on a distinction, but it often sounds most confident where it is least reliable. It may flatten a group into one story, swap a pair of terms such as race and ethnicity or incarceration and internment, read a law for more or less than it did, and produce quotations, statistics, and dates that look real and are not. Every claim it makes about a real person, law, or date you check against an issuing-body or primary source before you use it.

If your instructor publishes a traditional alternative. A traditional discussion is your own post and your own replies to classmates; a traditional assignment is your own submitted work, graded by your instructor. AI may help you think, but you write and submit the work yourself.

Disclosure. The share link documents your AI use on the AI-based activities, so they need no separate note. For any other graded work where AI help is allowed, add one line naming the tool and how you used it.

BYO-AI Access: equity, cost, and privacy

Equity and a non-AI route. You never have to create an account with a chatbot company to complete this course or to reach any grade in it. Every AI-based activity in this course carries an Equivalent route (no AI required) on its own page. It assesses the same objectives, for the same credit, against the same rubric. Take it whenever you like, for any reason or none; you do not have to ask permission, explain, or arrange it in advance.
Cost. A free tier of any approved chatbot covers everything in this course. No graded work depends on a paid subscription.
Privacy. Before you start, read what your chosen chatbot keeps of your conversations and how it uses them. Never paste personal information you would not want stored, and never paste anything that identifies a person you interviewed: your notes record roles and decades, not names, and they should stay that way when a chatbot reads them. Remember that a share link lets anyone who has it read that conversation.

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