Week 1 — A First Look at the Archive: Counts, Questions, and Positions — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 1 of the term — read the course archive the way the field reads any record, and explain the field to someone new to it.

This week you learned what ethnic studies is, where it came from, and how it reads a record: the four questions, the reading walk, and positionality. In this assignment you work four short problems on the course archive, interpret each one, and explain the field to someone who has never studied it. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Community History Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Your shared data is the course's community oral-history archive (illustrative), an unnamed public library's collection written for this course. It holds 7 excerpts, E1 to E7, each identified by the narrator's role and decade, never by name: E2 and E7 were interviewed in the 1990s, E1, E4, and E6 in the 2000s, and E3 and E5 in the 2010s. It has 5 intake rules:

1. Every narrator is an adult who agreed to be interviewed.
2. Each narrator signs the archive's consent and release form before the recording begins.
3. The narrator chooses the topics and may restrict or withdraw any part of the interview at any time.
4. Copies used in the course identify narrators by role and decade only; no name, address, or other identifying detail is reproduced.
5. Nothing a narrator asked to keep private is shared, quoted, or summarized.

Rules 1 to 3 protect consent and choice; rules 4 and 5 protect privacy.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic and citing your evidence:

1. The archive holds 7 excerpts, and 2 of them were recorded in the 1990s. How many of its excerpts were recorded in the 2000s or the 2010s?
2. The archive has 5 intake rules, and 3 of them protect consent and choice. How many of its intake rules protect privacy?
3. Two of the archive's 5 intake rules protect privacy. What fraction of its intake rules protect privacy, written as a decimal?
4. You ask the field's 4 questions of each of the archive's 5 intake rules. How many question-and-rule pairs do you answer in all?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: say what you would want to know about a narrator before trusting an excerpt, and what the archive must never tell you.
• Problem 2: walk rule 4 with the four questions (who made it, whom it served, whom it affected, how the people affected answered), then name what it leaves out and give your reading in one plain sentence.
• Problem 3: describe how two readers with different backgrounds might notice different things in rule 4, and explain why positionality does not disqualify either reader.
• Problem 4: place the field's origins in time (when and where the founding strike began, who led it, what it won, and the second strike that followed), and match the 4 departments the strikers demanded to the course's 4 core fields.

Explain it to a non-expert

A cousin asks you, "Isn't ethnic studies a brand-new class about one group, meant to make people feel guilty?" Write a 3–5 sentence message that corrects both parts of that claim in everyday words, using the field's dated origin and what the field compares and studies, and names one limit of what you can say after one week (for example, that the course defines its core terms next week). Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a neighbor asking whether a museum's booth of recorded neighborhood interviews "tells the whole truth about the neighborhood." Model answer: "The interviews tell you how some neighbors remember the place and what it meant to them, which a map or a permit cannot. They come from the people who agreed to speak, so they are a part of the story, not all of it. A memory can also move a date, so I would check any year someone mentions against a dated record. Read together with the records, they show more than either does alone."

Use that pattern for your message to the cousin, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic and cite your evidence. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report, and check every date against Chapter 1, without guessing which values, steps, or sources you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the cousin, correcting both parts of the claim in everyday words and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used (the archive's excerpt counts by decade and its intake-rule counts), so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled timeline sketch that places the strikes and matches the departments to the fields, with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Take every date from Chapter 1, and treat the archive's excerpts as the illustrative teaching material they are. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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