Bronwen MA Jones – författare

This book questions what ‘educating the whole child’ means in the context of our current neoliberal education system. In analysing the impact of how education policy is enacted and understood, it examines how this ‘neoliberalisation’ has shaped the personal and ethical relations of education.The book is unique in raising questions about the way in which a common and universally held truth about the importance and value of educating the whole child is conceptualised and articulated in education policy. Employing Foucault’s concepts of bio power, governmentality, the dispositif and subjectivities, this book explores the importance of psy-scientific knowledge, systems of education governance and classroom practices in constructing a neoliberal whole child. It examines how government policy structures the relationship between the child, school and government and claims that current policy and practice operate as forms of bio power that extends neoliberal governance to the emotional and moral life of the child.Educating the Neoliberal Whole Child will be of great interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of education policy, sociology of education and critical pedagogy. It is also a valuable addition to studies of Foucault and education.

This book questions what ‘educating the whole child’ means in the context of our current neoliberal education system. In analysing the impact of how education policy is enacted and understood, it examines how this ‘neoliberalisation’ has shaped the personal and ethical relations of education.The book is unique in raising questions about the way in which a common and universally held truth about the importance and value of educating the whole child is conceptualised and articulated in education policy. Employing Foucault’s concepts of bio power, governmentality, the dispositif and subjectivities, this book explores the importance of psy-scientific knowledge, systems of education governance and classroom practices in constructing a neoliberal whole child. It examines how government policy structures the relationship between the child, school and government and claims that current policy and practice operate as forms of bio power that extends neoliberal governance to the emotional and moral life of the child.Educating the Neoliberal Whole Child will be of great interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of education policy, sociology of education and critical pedagogy. It is also a valuable addition to studies of Foucault and education.

The ongoing neoliberalisation of education is complex, varied and relentless. It involves increasingly diverse material and structural changes to curriculum, pedagogy and assessment and at the same time transforms how we are made up as educational subjects. It rearticulates what it means to be educated. This collection brings together creative and unanticipated examples of the adoption and adaptation of neoliberal practice, both collective and individual. These examples not only demonstrate the insidiousness of neoliberal reform but also suggest that its trajectory is uncertain and unfixed. The intention is that these examples might embolden education scholars and practitioners to think differently about education.This book is shaped by a reading of the processes of the neoliberalisation of education as a dispositif. This heterogeneous dispositif encompasses and spans an uneven, miscellaneous and evolving network of educational regimes of knowledge, practice and subjectivities, as well as artifacts and non-human actants. The papers included address different aspects or points within this complex arrangement at different levels and in different sectors of education. They have been chosen to illustrate the evolving and multi-faceted penetration of market thinking and practice in education and also points of deflection and dissent. They also offer coverage of some of the uneven geography of neoliberalisation. They consider the potential for the production of subjectivities to provide the ‘wriggle’ room that can exist to refuse or subvert neoliberal identities. This book will have appeal across the social sciences and specifically to those working in education. The chapters included here were originally published in various Taylor & Francis journals.