The work of Michel Foucault has become a major resource for educational researchers seeking to understand how education makes us what we are. In this book, a group of contributors explore how Foucault’s work is used in a variety of ways to explore the ‘hows’ and ‘whos’ of education policy – its technologies and its subjectivities, its oppressions and its freedoms. The book takes full advantage of the opportunities for creativity that Foucault’s ideas and methods offer to researchers in deploying genealogy, discourse, and subjectivation as analytic devices. The collection as a whole works to makes us aware that we are freer than we think! This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education Policy.

First published in 1990, this book was the first to explore Foucault's work in relation to education, arguing that schools, like prisons and asylums, are institutions of moral and social regulation, complex technologies of disciplinary control where power and knowledge are crucial. Original and challenging, the essays assess the relevance of Foucault's work to educational practice, and show how the application of Foucauldian analysis to education enables us to see the politics of educational reform in a new light.

Foucault, Power, and Education invites internationally renowned scholar Stephen J. Ball to reflect on the importance and influence of Foucault on his work in educational policy. By focusing on some of the ways Foucault has been placed in relation to educational questions or questions about education, Ball highlights the relationships between Foucault's concepts and methods, and educational research and analysis. An introductory chapter offers a brief explanation of some of Foucault's key concerns, while additional chapters explore ways in which Ball himself has sought to apply Foucault's ideas in addressing contemporary educational issues. In this intensely personal and reflective text, Ball offers an interpretation of his Foucault--That is, his own particular reading of the Foucauldian toolbox. Ideal for courses in education policy and education studies, this valuable teaching resource is essential reading for any education scholar looking for a starting point into the literature and ideas of Foucault.

Textbook

This book explores the works of Michel Foucault and their relevance for educational theory and practice. Gail McNicol Jardine investigates Foucault's early examinations of the transformation of systems of knowledge as societies change, his in-depth, critical analyses of Knowledge-Power, and his increasingly more explicit examination of the relationship of the Self to acts of Knowledge-Power. Specific themes that are explored from Foucault's work are archeology, genealogy, disciplinary knowledge and power, normality, the gaze, panopticism, the examination, critique and resistance. This primer contains ample references that allow the reader to examine Foucault's own use of these important analytic concepts and tools. This book will be useful in undergraduate and graduate courses in education, critical theory, educational theory, critical pedagogy, philosophy, psychology, and sociology.

Specially selected by Stephen Ball, this is a collection of the best and most interesting recently published papers that ‘use’ Foucault to analyse, destablise and re-claim educational ‘problems’. Arguably the best known social theorist in the western world, Foucault’s work is now widely used by researchers and writers in many fields of social science. These papers not only demonstrate the practical applicability of Foucault to things ‘cracked’ and things ‘intolerable’ in making them ‘not as necessary as all that’; they are also transposable, in that they offer forms and methods of analysis which can be taken up and applied and used in other settings, sectors, and policy fields.

Education has a long tradition of opening itself up to new ideas and new ideas are what Working with Foucault in Education is all about. The book introduces readers to the scholarly work of Michel Foucault at a level that it neither too demanding not too superficial.