Questioning democratic notions of governance: A case study examining how a kindergarten teacher and her students give voice to and enact a neoliberal framing of schooling

An important factor that may be missing from recent attempts to counter, resist, and/or reconceptualize the neoliberal framing of the early education process is the actions of children, particularly those that reinforce the neoliberal assemblage of schooling they learn through their interactions with their teacher in school. This article begins to address this issue by employing Foucault’s conceptions of governmentality to examine how a teacher and students in a kindergarten classroom located in the USA give voice to and make choices that reflect the dominant neoliberal discourses of schooling. Such an analysis creates the opportunity to consider what needs to be done to assist both early educators and the children themselves so that they can live in the presence of each other within their neoliberal classrooms otherwise.