About These Sample Syllabi

These three syllabi are working documents from SOC 250: Racial and Ethnic Communities in the United States, taught at Lehman College, CUNY, across the 2026 calendar year. Rather than a single model syllabus, the collection shows the same course redesigned three times for three different teaching situations: a fifteen-week WAC-annotated synchronous term, a compressed six-week online summer session, and a fifteen-week asynchronous fall term organized around settler colonialism and the carceral state. All three are openly licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and reference their readings rather than reproducing them, so instructors are free to adapt them.

Across all three editions, writing is treated as the central practice of the course. They share a common architecture — no-cost materials, low-stakes weekly discussion posts, and a scaffolded progression toward a formal analytical task (a documentary analysis worksheet) — while varying in modality, pacing, thematic emphasis, and the writing-support apparatus around each assignment. Those differences are instructive in their own right for anyone adapting the course to a particular calendar and student population.

At a Glance

The Three Syllabi

The collection includes three editions of SOC 250, each with a distinct purpose.

• SOC 250 Syllabus — Spring 2026 (WAC Annotated) — A fifteen-week online synchronous course, presented as a Writing Across the Curriculum demonstration. Each major writing assignment is followed by a WAC Pedagogy Note explaining its writing-to-learn function, making this edition a working template for integrating writing into a content-area course. Its four assignment genres — weekly posts, co-leading discussion, a metacognitive midterm essay, and a documentary analysis worksheet — model a full semester of scaffolded writing.
• SOC 250 Syllabus — Summer 2026 (Six-Week Online) — A compressed six-week online asynchronous session anchored by weekly documentary screenings paired with readings, podcasts, and data visualizations. Its streamlined two-assessment structure — weekly discussion posts in Weeks 1–4 building toward a final documentary analysis — shows how the course condenses for an intensive summer calendar without losing its writing focus.
• SOC 250 Syllabus — Fall 2026 (Online Asynchronous) — A fifteen-week online asynchronous course organized around conquest, dispossession, and surveillance, with thematic weeks running from Sovereignty to Solidarity. Each week opens with an epigraph from an anchor text pairing recent scholarship with foundational sources. A three-part assessment design — discussion posts, a midterm reflective essay, and a final documentary analysis — together with a generous late-work policy makes this the fullest single-term model in the set.

Read together, the three editions function less as alternatives than as a demonstration of adaptation: one course, one set of learning objectives, rebuilt for synchronous and asynchronous delivery, full and compressed calendars, and different thematic emphases. Instructors are encouraged to treat them as a starting point — adopting a single edition wholesale or assembling their own from across the three.