 Hi. Welcome to Action Piece. Action Piece is a part of Building Bridges where we have a more interactive portion of the day and gives people an opportunity to really engage with what they're learning throughout the day as well. Our Action Piece this year focuses primarily through K-12 education opposed to different parts of the conference that are focusing more on that museum canon aspect along with literature aspects as well and higher education. So welcome. We hope you enjoy. Seventh grade. Thank you. I suppose you're loving coming back. This room we're going to learn a little bit about tracking. So tracking is the practice of dividing students based on their academic ability. It's typically permanent so usually what happens is you'll take a standardized test in say like sixth grade. You'll be put on this math or English course track and you'll be there until high school. So it often divides students based on their ability and it leads to a lot of bias as well as just some inequities in their education. So Emily here is going to learn a little bit about what tracking is. Emily tested into the grade level so she's currently reading through kind of what the grade level learner typically what the grade level learner looks like. There's also a bunch of little post-it notes around that kind of outline what some teachers will say to grade level students and also we repeat that for the gifted and talented tracks as well as the remedial tracks. So the point of this room Emily is going to be walking through some minutes to win at games and she's going to get certain advantages or disadvantages based on her track. So we're going to start out with here with Pong led by Megan. All right Emily here since she is in the grade level for this game she will be given 10 ping pong balls and since she's at the grade level she'll be able to stand right up at the edge of the table and what she has to do in order to make it to eighth grade is put four ping pong balls into these cups in 30 seconds. Would you like to give it a try? Yep. All right. Oh. All right keep going. Time's on the clock. Emily is getting grade eight since seventh grade. Emily passed. Because she met the standard she will be moving on along her track to algebra one. Mar take it away. In this game you are going to transfer as many marshmallows from one plate to another and chopsticks because you are on the grade level. So your time starts now. Wait how many do I have to get to the other plate? You need to get like half. That's the standard. It's like algebra one is a little more difficult for Emily. There's a lot of letters in here. We can't really see the stroke here. Well this isn't fair I don't know how to use chopsticks. There are many disadvantages that students may have in those grade level courses using chopsticks is representative of those. Okay you have 10 seconds. Time is done. All right Emily unfortunately you did not meet the standard for algebra one in eighth grade. Because you did so well in pre-algebra we know you have the skills. So we are going to let you move on but you are going to have to go to summer school. So you have summer school here after eighth grade. No more hanging out with your friends. You'll have to read the algebra one. But luckily for you you do get to move on to geometry the next year. And the final test today is the writing down a list of words relating to the conference for Emily. Next time after memorizing the words for 20 seconds and writing it for 40 seconds. Until a minute. Are you ready Emily? Yep. You now may begin memorizing. 30 seconds. You may now start writing the words for the next 40 seconds. Reminders she does have one extra trip to memorize the words. 15 seconds. Time's up. All right Emily how many words did you achieve? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Well done. The standard was six. Emily has passed geometry. She can move on to algebra too. So as you can see by these minutes of winning games, once Emily was tested into that track, once Emily tested into pre-algebra, there was no escaping the route she was on. So even though she passed pre-algebra flying colors, she probably could have maybe succeeded in some of the gifted and talented courses. There's no way for her to get there. So tracking leads to these harmful biases. It leads to these harmful motivation decreases as well. And really just puts a damper on students' education. So come to the building bridges conference, learn a little bit more about tracking. Let's go to the next room. Hi, welcome to my room. So this is supposed to replicate a U.S. history room and how it's very Eurocentric focusing on white history, straight history, or male history. And we don't really get to see a lot of marginalized groups in history. And so this half of the room is very focused on America and we've got an eagle there and American flag. And then we have Kahoot up here, which just has questions comparing white history to black history and you're supposed to be able to recall the white history because that's where it's taught and maybe you don't really know the black history as well. And then over here is a gallery walk to freshen up on some topics that maybe weren't mentioned in your history class during secondary school. Just an example of a couple of questions. If you were a room, we're both an action piece. Our room is the mental health room. So we're starting off with the test zone where we'll split the group into two different groups and they will each receive a test. And then afterwards, after they take the test, we'll move into a time where you're going to kind of walk around the room and look at the boards. We've got a couple different things for people to look at while they do that so Abby can explain the test a little bit better. Okay, so we have two different tests and the group when they walk in is going to be split into two different groups and one group will take a test that is normal, that what everybody sees, and then the other group will take a test where the letters are a little bit scrambled and so it's a lot harder to understand and read it to show what a student with dyslexia could potentially see. It's a little bit over exaggerative just to just make a point. And so the test, all the questions have something to do with mental health and behavior issues and all these different things that add into mental health for students. And the group taking the test with the letters all mixed up will take the test in only a minute to kind of show that those students who normally have a disability with testing would have a little bit harder time getting that done in the given time. And the other group would take it and have two minutes and have a little extra time just to show that there's extra time for them. And so the group with the normal test also has the spot to sit where you can see a poster that directly says the answers just to give them a little bit more of an advantage to show the differences. And then afterwards we'll kind of give people the opportunity to look at the boards and read and write different words of support for the first board for people struggling with mental illness. And so there'll be that board. And then the second board we have is words of wisdom for those struggling with learning disabilities. So that's kind of anybody that struggled with them before or struggled with learning disabilities before can kind of write ideas that they've had that help them get through. And we also have some posters that kind of describe just the differences and what you can look for with depression, anxiety and ADHD and also kind of explains what you can do to help people who have that even just to be supportive and everything. And then we also have a list of on-campus resources that students can use but also it explains too that on our Gustavus website you can look at the mental health resources and there's also a lot of online ones that people who don't go to campus could use too. And then so right here you can see the actual tests. So you can see that the left one has been edited to kind of be a little bit harder to read and then the right one is the unedited version that just has them normally. And then right here you can see the poster kind of that tells all the different answers for people. And so yes. Which is real. So we have a few different tests for students to partake in and now we're going to fold them up. So we have a writing test and one of them is very easy. You're supposed to write this in your handwriting but the other test that the partner of the person sitting here is going to get is a symbols which is ridiculously a lot harder and especially in only a minute is pretty much impossible. So our reading exam is something that is at a first grade comprehension level but then we ran it through Google Translate a few times. And now it is absolutely incomprehensible and we'll take a quiz on that as well. Now you do want to talk about we will also have a listening portion with a video much like these. Olivia, no. Your turn is inappropriate. I can see your shoulders. It's distracting. Please cover up. Olivia. We can continue on our test. So this one will be an open note exam however. So while you're listening you can take notes and the videos are technically in English but some of them use random words or such high level academic language in ways that does not make sense so that even if it is open notes it is a hopeless thing to try and do. And so the videos what we want the viewers to get out of it is the one that is just a bunch of academic jargon is kind of talking about the kind of unfairness of some academic language even though it is in well English speakers native language it's still incomprehensible. And with the other one it's how English sounds to non-English speakers and that one you can pick up certain phrases and words and that's kind of how you start the languages at first but then comprehension overall is a little bit trickier and yeah in the writing one as well the symbols are meant to represent alphabets different than our own that we're learning in new languages and kind of the trickiness of switching between that when you don't even know what letters mean what and then the reading just kind of more on the comprehension level too. Yeah, I think that's all. Thank you. Hi, welcome to our final room for our action piece walkthrough and here is kind of just a reflection room where we have the opportunity to look back on what we learned today within action piece and see what also others have learned this is an anonymous posting and so what we're going to have everyone do is each room has a question on the board that kind of represents what the room was about so for example within the first room that we were in that talked about marginalized histories within education so people are welcome to answer the question with post-its we'll have markers for everybody to grab as well so we have a question for each room and we also have just a final reflection on what people learn today at building bridges in general within educational injustice and action piece I would say a final thank you for joining us on our virtual action piece walkthrough we're really sad that you couldn't make it today so we do hope you can come in the future have a great rest of your day, thank you