I found the Bernard reading to be very interesting in terms of methods. The activities of listing things in a category and picking one option out of three do not seem to mean much but researchers have been able to use these activities to show ways people understand things. For example, I saw moose as the obvious odd one out without consideration of sharks being out of the category for not being a mammal. From a participant’s perspective, I could see how little conscious thought the activity took to be able to generate data that can be usefully interpreted.
For the Shange reading, I thought Roberson was a good site for a study, as its outwards projection of progressivism and commitment to diversity is contrasted with antiblackness and presence of the school-to-prison pipeline. Shange called this contradiction carceral progressivism and pointed out a broad issue of anti-blackness in what is meant to be progressive causes. With Roberson in particular it was shown how the efforts made to increase college eligibility were progressive but did not make up for more deeply ingrained inequity. A takeaway I got from this was that the education system is willing to make changes in education structure such as eliminating Ds to cheaply generate progressive appearing statistics but are not willing to lower police presence and arrests in schools or provide reparative measures to make college more financially accessible for black students who are eligible. This focus on easier and cheaper progressive goals as opposed to addressing root issues is at the heart of carceral progressivism and is clearly demonstrated by Shange.