The ClassDojo App: Training in the Art of Neoliberalism

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine how ClassDojo, the online classroom communication and behavior management platform, has emerged as a vehicle for the discursive production of neoliberal subjectivities in early and middle grades education. Guided by Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I will consider ClassDojo as a “surface of emergence” for the production of neoliberal discourses in the contemporary American classroom. In particular, I will explore how ClassDojo may function as a disciplinary technology that contributes to the integration of subjects as homo economici—that is, individuals who govern themselves within an economic grid of intelligibility, one that renders competition, accumulation, and surveillance as common-sense values in education.

Author

• Thomas Bradley Robinson, University of Georgia - Athens