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Using document analysis, this paper examines the historical emergence of the quantified child, revealing how the collection and use of data has become normalized through legitimizing discourses. First, following in the traditions of Foucault's genealogy and studies examining the sociology of numbers, this paper traces the evolution of data collection in a range of significant education policy documents. Second, a word count analysis was used to further substantiate the claim that data collection and use has been increasingly normalized through legitimizing discourses and routine actions in educational settings. These analyses provide evidence that the need to quantify educational practices has been justified over long periods of time through a variety of documents and that the extent to which data governs educators’ thoughts, discourses, and actions has dramatically increased during the past century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper takes as its subject the circulation of tolerance discourse within two pedagogical encounters in two Australian educational settings, and draws from the work of Wendy Brown on tolerance as a regulatory force. Brown argues that discourses of tolerance are produced within historical and cultural milieu that enable tolerance and aversion to exist simultaneously. This has significant implications for how we might come to understand the project of working towards a socially just educational system and the various struggles encountered within pedagogical sites. I also examine the pedagogical affects that are produced within different educational moments as we work to teach in or around difference and when we embody the Other in the classroom. I engage with how these experiences speak to the way in which tolerance as national ideal acts to both alleviate and circulate discourses of inequality such as sexism and homophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the increasing interest of Swedish schools to construct, analyze, assess and control the individual progression and social integration of students using biographical registers. I argue that this tendency - involving biography as a form of governance - can be seen as a revision of early 20th-century biographical research by the Chicago School of Sociology. In this paper I consider the theoretical, methodological and political background of the Chicago work in order to compare it to the Swedish use of student biographies. Their current use involves a twofold subjectification of students - as "objects" of assessment and as "relays" for assessment. Finally, this subjectivity is understood in relation to international initiatives in education restructuring where new ways of governing - often labeled as progressive - impose social control, heighten individual responsibility and, not least, create new forms of social exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the symposium titled Educational Research and the Necessity of Theory." The papers in the symposium arose out of the concern that educational researchers in Great Britain have neglected, and continue to neglect, and even deliberately avoid, theory. There are two opposing groups when it comes to theory. There are those of found it scary and frightening and there are those who are excited by it and believes that "theory floated their boat." The author believes that theory is an essential aspect of educational research and other research in social sciences.

This article addresses Making the Difference (Connell et al., 1982) as a research project, in the specific context of Australian education and Australian sociology. It argues that the form of its research and writing have been as influential as the argument itself, and illustrates these themes by comparing that project of the early 1980s with two more recent Australian projects of the late 1990s. It is suggested that Making the Difference was successful in illustrating class and culturally based inequalities in the form of Australian schooling, and in illuminating some gendered processes of that schooling, but that its proposal for an 'organic working class curriculum' was difficult and utopian in conception, and quickly overtaken by broader interests in school 'effectiveness', and political moves to 'third way' policies rather than class war. It is argued that the Queensland New Basics project illustrates some of the lessons of engagement and communication offered by Making the Difference, and also the pragmatism of this new political context; and that the longitudinal 12 to 18 Project attempted to build on insights about class and gender of the earlier work, but with attention to some of the limitations of the type of focus on class of that work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]