SHIFTING PEDAGOGY AND POLITICS IN THE PRACTICE OF DIVERSITY (The Role of Diversity in Discourses and Practices in British Education in the Era of Neoliberalism)

The aim of this paper is to map the ways in which diversity relays and mobilizes a set of neoliberal positions and relationships in the field of education and seeks to govern education institutions and education users through politically circulating norms and values. I explore the pedagogical and political shift marked by the meaning and practice of diversity offered through New Labor education policy texts, specifically, the policy and practice of personalized learning (or personalization). These norms and values, I want to argue, echo and redeem the kinds of frameworks, applications and rationalities typically aligned with modes of neoliberal or advanced liberal governance, e.g. marketization, monetarization, atomization and deregulation. I conclude the paper by considering how diversity in education renders problematic conventional antinomies of the citizen and consumer, public and private, state and civil society, etc., and forces us to confront the rhizomatic character of contemporary governance and education in the era of neoliberalism