About Our Program
The Ethnic Studies Department at Mt. San Antonio College uses a wide range of materials, from literary and musical works, to sociological, anthropological, political, philosophical studies and historical texts, in order to interrogate systems of power, race, ethnicity, and indigeneity, and social movements, past and present. We trace the ways these categories shape and are shaped by a variety of complex issues, such as colonialism, military conflict, and the relations between capital and labor. Our courses also examine social categories of identity and difference, and how they are produced, resisted, internalized, embraced, and mutate across time and space.
By familiarizing students with social, cultural, and political forces and their connections to other axes of stratification, while prioritizing the voices and perspectives of non-dominant individuals and minoritized communities, we open up a critical and intellectual space with which we have the opportunity to deconstruct the term “Ethnic” in “Ethnic Studies,” while simultaneously and intentionally affirming it.
Program Goals
- Meet general education requirements (Area F) for all students.
- Prepare students planning to transfer and earn a BA degree in Ethnic Studies (e.g., Chicano Studies, African American Studies, Native American Studies, or Asian American Studies) and professional fields, including social sciences, humanities, law, teaching, social work, and public administration.
- Provide the skills and knowledge needed for success in courses at Mt. San Antonio college and for courses at four-year colleges and universities.
- Development of students’ ability to think critically and express themselves in an organized, logical, and critical manner.
- Help students to succeed in the pursuit of excellence in their individual, academic and career goals.
- Empower our students to become ethical, effective, social justice artist-activist-scholars and empathetic leaders who speak truth to power.
- Provide students a solid academic understanding of their socio-economic, political, and historical realities.
- Provide space for students to individually and collectively heal, mourn, dream, and create.
- Promote holistic and critical health and wellness.
Program Learning Outcomes
Critical Frameworks
- Develop deep knowledge of historical, contemporary, and intersectional perspectives on race and ethnicity.
- Gain familiarity with different disciplinary methods applied to race and ethnicity.
- Broaden a critical perspective on the legacies of colonization and empire.
Communication
- Develop the ability to account for other people's arguments, to formulate one's own arguments, and to locate both arguments in the larger context of the field.
- Develop the ability to formulate an argument in alternative media, such as speech, audiovisual, digital, and other forms of non-written communication.
- Grow effective writing skills in the interdisciplinary field.
Community Collaboration, Engagement, and Activism
- Gain an understanding of how the four core historically racialized groups have, and continue, to collaborate in pursuit of liberation.
- Gain an understanding of the issues, ethics, and methods surrounding activist, collaborative,
and community-based projects.
