Anthropology
2022-2023 Program Review

The Anthropology Department is an academic department teaching 17 transfer-level anthropology courses that satisfy General Education and degree requirements. This coursework spans all of the five major subdisciplines in the field of anthropology: biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and applied anthropology. 

The department offers two Anthropology degrees: the Anthropology AA-T and the Anthropology AS, and contributes to the interdisciplinary General Science AS. Anthropology Department courses include CSU, UC, and C-ID approved courses that also contribute to certificates and degrees in career and technical education, as well as academic programs across the college, including Communications, Funeral Service Education, Pre-Health Occupations, and Respiratory Care, among others. Two Anthropology Department courses contribute to the ARC Honors Certificate.

The ARC Mission and Vision are at the core of the Anthropology Department’s curriculum and our approach to all we do. Anthropology is the study of humans; our courses focus on the issues of human biological and cultural diversity. Students benefit from anthropology classes whether they're a discipline major or taking courses to fulfill a general education requirement by gaining a better understanding of what it means to be human in all its complexity. We are a critical part of introducing students to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Anthropology courses are, by nature of the very subject matter we teach and the discipline’s orientation to teaching and learning, inclusive with a strong emphasis on equity. This is bolstered by our faculty’s dedication to equity work and allyship as an ongoing facet of our identities as educators. Our courses are academically rich with a strong emphasis on fostering critical thinking skills and applying critical thinking to real-world problems, supporting our students’ wide range of career and educational goals.

In addition to how and what we teach, another way our department fosters inclusivity and the support of all students is through teaching a wide variety classes in many modalities, including traditional face-to-face lecture and lab courses, as well as online asynchronous lecture and lab courses, hybrid face-to-face/asynchronous online courses, and hybrid online asynchronous/synchronous courses. The Anthropology Department employs a variety of teaching methods and pedagogical approaches including collaborative inquiry in discussion, discussion boards, team learning, and service learning, supporting diverse learning styles.

Things have changed dramatically. One of the two classrooms we'd used for years was re-assigned to English, leading to increased scheduling issues. The Covid pandemic and shift to online education for effectively the past three years has forced us to be much more fluid in how we address issues. It's difficult to plan in advance when you don't know what things will look like. That said, there have been some goals that have been met, while others have remained unfulfilled.

Our program offers a diverse and inclusive curriculum, as it has for decades. It creates clear pathways for graduation and transfer as well as job opportunities with private industry and the State. We have maintained our efforts to attract and support the success of a diverse population of students, including disproportionately impacted populations. Action steps to achieve this goal include continuing our department’s practice of wide involvement in college programs supporting students in DI populations and through non-traditional pathways. This includes teaching sections of anthropology courses and promoting anthropology to students within the Pacific Islander Asian American Resilience Integrity Self-Empowerment Education (PRISE) Learning Community, the Puente LearningCommunity, APIDA, Accelerated College Education (ACE), California Early College Academy (CECA) and Dual Enrollment (DE).

Every course in our program with set standard data has met this metric. Our program’s required classes (ANTH 300, 301, 310, and 320) all reached the goal for the set standard numbers. The department’s elective classes are not offered at a high frequency, such as ANTH 370 Primatology, which is in the schedule every spring in even years. As a result, their statistics show N/A. The Anthropology Department has continued to achieve high productivity rates, as well, although this metric has not been immune to the forces and trends that have reduced enrollments and productivity throughout higher education and across the college.

A long-standing goal of our department has been the updating of collections and completion of the NAGPRA and CalNAGPRA processes. With the greater institutional support provided in the past year and extensive dedication of time and resources by department faculty, significant strides have been made in the completion of this goal.Some prior goals from previous cycles remain unmet, as they require the institutional resources necessary to implement them. While some work with the department’s biological anthropology and ethnographic collections have received institutional support as part of the NAGPRA process, full completion of this process is still pending with some needs remaining unfulfilled. Our department is also in need of a Biological Anthropology Lab Instructional Assistant and tutor, a prior need that is also awaiting the necessary funding for completion.

Our specialty classes appear to serve DI students well such as ANTH 303 (Forensic Anthropology), ANTH 321 (Ancient Technology), ANTH 333 (Indians of California), ANTH 334 (Native Peoples of North America), ANTH 336 (Anthropology of Sex, Sexuality, and Gender), and ANTH 370 (Primatology) in addition to required classes such as ANTH 320 (Archaeology) and our honors offerings (ANTH 480 and ANTH 481). It is especially important to note that ANTH 333, ANTH 334, and ANTH 336 were meant to serve our DI communities as well as introduce allies to this important information.

The Anthropology Department faculty’s own ongoing equity work and efforts within our program to engage students in a variety of assignments and approaches to increase students’ own equity awareness have shown great success. One example is the Anthropology Department’s involvement in Día de los Muertos Oak Park, a month-long series of events and culminating observation of the Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos in the predominantly Latino Sacramento neighborhood of Oak Park. Our department’s students have gained greater cultural awareness and knowledge through attendance of the event and have substantially developed their own exposure to equity work and allyship, as well as Cultural Anthropology and Applied Anthropology, through service learning that has brought their education into the “real world” and has given back to the community we serve.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to some challenges and successes that were unforeseen in future cycles. For example, in the face of the widespread college closure, in Spring 20202019, all Anthropology Department faculty - even those who had not used Canvas extensively or taught online before - were able to develop online courses and successfully support students through the challenges of the semester. 

As a department, we have several classes that had long been regarded as what is now commonly known as “difficult to convert” and which we had not previously offered in an online format. The COVID-19 pandemic spurred the need, creative energy, and institutional resources necessary to develop fully online sections of these courses (ANTH 301 Biological Anthropology Lab, ANTH 303 Forensic Anthropology, and ANTH 341 Introduction to Linguistics) and begin offering them to our students. This has increased the flexibility of our program and allows us the option to continue to offer this modality for these classes, resulting in greater access for a variety of student populations now and into the future.

Our department also recognizes the ongoing need for support of students, particularly those in DI populations to continue the success that has been achieved, despite the many challenges of the pandemic, as well as continue to reduce disproportionate impacts, particularly among African American and Latino students. 

The data show that, given the limitations on resources and significant challenges we have experienced associated with the pandemic, staffing, and additional demands posed by NAGPRA and CalNAGPRA compliance, our department has been highly effective in meeting many of our goals. We have shown success in reducing disproportionate impacts, fostering equity work and allyship among our students, and have demonstrated high productivity. That said, this also highlights the path to guide future action, as our department’s future goals and needs to achieve them are clear.

In the current cycle, many of our goals have been affected by the pandemic closure and the focus on the legally-mandated NAGPRA/CalNAGPRA work being done with the ethnographic collections in our care. The combination of most of our classes being scheduled online and having our primary classroom space reserved for the sorting, cataloging, and monitoring of those artifacts being considered for repatriation under NAGPRA and CalNAGPRA has restricted our ability to meet with students in the ways we’d like and limited our ability to teach in the variety of modalities that we know best support their success. Further, many of our long-term adjuncts have retired during this time, and those that were hired in their places have limited availability for on-campus teaching and activities. 

One major challenge is lack of faculty. We had one of only four department full-time faculty members retire at the start of COVID as well as 5 (the majority) of our adjunct faculty, leading to a loss of institutional knowledge as well as a persistent problem simply staffing classes. The remaining three full-time faculty have been forced to take overload in addition to serving on PRTs and standing committees such as Senate and the Curriculum Committee, updating curriculum, mentoring students virtually, and working for several years to update and upgrade our department facilities all while spending hours each month engaged in the considerable additional work involved in identifying and repatriating potential NAGPRA materials. 

Additionally, hiring new adjunct faculty in the discipline has proven challenging as hiring pools remain highly limited, particularly for our most-needed classes in the subdiscipline of biological anthropology. This remains a problem despite full-time faculty cultivating long-standing relationships with partner institutions in our region from which potential instructors are likely to graduate, as well as recruitment and outreach efforts. Retention of the part-time faculty we have been able to hire has also proven to be an issue. Of the adjunct faculty our department has been able to hire, a significant proportion have been hired into full-time positions in the discipline or outside of anthropology or have limitations on their ability to teach face-to-face classes, exacerbating the challenge of staffing our department’s classes and increasing the proportion of classes taught on campus.

The ideal future for the Anthropology Department involves capitalizing on our strengths: continuing to support the success of  all students by decreasing disproportionate impacts and supporting allyship and student awareness and engagement with equity. We envision offering our department’s full breadth of diverse courses and providing students diverse pedagogical approaches and modalities. We would like to continue engagement with DI populations and programs that support students who are part of identified DI and non-traditional student populations.

This vision for the department’s future aligns well with the college’s Mission in achieving high quality education that supports a range of educational and career goals, as well as the equity work American River College is currently engaged in.

To enhance the Anthropology Department’s effectiveness, our department has several specific goals. (1) First, we need to complete the work in progress under NAGPRA/CalNAGPRA. This includes the identification of remaining items for repatriation, turning these items over to the ARC Tribal Liaison for completion of the repatriation process, and the restoration of the Anthropology Department’s primary classroom for teaching.

The substantial investment of faculty resources needed for the NAGPRA and CalNAGPRA process and associated loss of classroom space has had an impact on our department’s ability to achieve our goals in the manner that we had envisioned. Completing the current NAGPRA and CalNAGPRA identification and repatriation process will free a substantial amount of faculty time and energy that cannot currently be invested in program development work and other faculty duties. 

The restoration of the Anthropology Department’s primary classroom will free up the space needed to offer a larger proportion of our classes in on-ground formats, as well as supporting higher quality education in these classes, due to proper classroom layout and alignment for the type of lab and lecture classes we teach and pedagogical approaches our faculty employ. The achievement of this goal will also support the additional goals listed below, as the demands this process has placed on our department’s faculty and the toll it has taken has been substantial. In conjunction with the staffing shortages described in Section 3.1, faculty burnout is a significant concern.

(2) Second, the ability of our department to offer the breadth and quality of courses needed will be strongly supported by hiring a full-time Biological Anthropology professor. The loss of both full-time and part-time faculty and associated staffing shortages have also impacted our department substantially. Despite these challenges, our department has continued to effectively serve students. However, it is clear that greater support will be necessary to maintain our department’s level of success, as the level of student need surpasses our staffing. 

We need a full-time biological anthropology professor and a dedicated lab assistant/tutor to serve students at the level they deserve. We have neither, and neither are likely to be hired in the upcoming academic year. 

We need anthropology tutors for subject assistance for online students struggling with the topics, especially our DI populations and English Language Learner (ELL) community who may not reach out for help when doing poorly on assignments. (3) The best approach to meet this need would be to hire a Student Personnel Assistant who is 100%: time, with 50% time dedicated to serving as a lab assistant and 50% time serving as a tutor. 

Addressing these goals will support our department in achieving our other goals, including (4) fostering and sustaining collaborations with programs supporting DI populations. As of 2022, Anthropology has been working closely with the Pacific Islander Asian American Resilience, Integrity Self-Empowerment Education (PRISE) coordinators who are creating programming to reach out to the Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) students to form cohorts and assist students achieve their educational goals. ANTH 300 and 310 have at least one section per semester with seats set aside for these PRISE students. Additionally for decades we have worked closely with Puente to encourage the Puentistas in their academic endeavors by offering Latinx-focused curriculum in introductory level classes such as ANTH 300 and 301. Our courses and professors are on the Puente list of classes that welcome Latinx students. We can track the enrollment and retention numbers for these two groups in the coming cycle.

Increased faculty staffing and the return of our primary classroom to use for teaching classes will also allow us to (5) increase the number of sections that we can offer in on-ground, face-to-face modality. This will increase the diversity of formats students can take Anthropology classes in and will provide choices that will support student success, including students in DI populations who may prefer and many of whom most often succeed in a format with structured meeting times, in-person instruction and student interactions.

These enhancements to our unit will have a substantial impact on the Anthropology Department’s ability to achieve the social justice and equity work that is at the core of our discipline and teaching philosophy, as well as our college’s goals.

While many students thrive in online learning environments, DI students more often struggle to complete online coursework due to lack of social interaction and in-person support. As Anthropology is able to increase in-classroom offerings, students from DI communities will find more ways to succeed academically and personally. 

Student success, particularly among DI populations, will also increase with the reinstatement of anthropology tutoring and lab assistant support from an Anthropology SPA. Hiring faculty and achieving adequate staffing levels will directly support this outcome, as well.

Achieving these goals will also allow faculty the opportunity to maintain, foster, and grow our own equity work and the creative ways we have integrated material fostering students’ own allyship, awareness, and critical thinking regarding social justice and equity work in their own lives. Our department has a track record of success in this area and achieving our other goals will allow the space and faculty resources to properly continue these significant and fruitful efforts.