The purpose of this round table is to discuss various aspects of the current trend in educational praxis to use individualized technologies. This we claim is a governing which produces power asymmetries; it colonizes the learner in different ways and differentiates 'the Other'. The perspective we employ is mainly based on discourse analysis in a wider sense, following the theories of Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe and Norman Fairclough. One of the presentations concerns the use of individualized writing, e.g. in the form of logs or diaries, as a procedure well established within literary studies at university as well as at lower stages at school. By the teachers’ scrutiny of the texts produced in this context as a means of control, students’ learning is unveiled and the desires and personal beliefs of the students are exposed and explored in a way comparable to colonization. Another presentation refers to the academic subject of religion. In religious studies, shared values as they are formulated in a school context are related to an individualized concept of religion which might be and must be questioned in a post-colonial perspective. A third presentation concerns policies of teaching and education in the European countries in recent times. With a basis in European official policy documents following the Lisbon Strategy of March 2000, how is the good student and the good teacher pictured? What are the means or technologies employed in order to enhance the European union’s competitive strand through ‘good students’ and ‘good teachers’ and ‘good schools’? A fourth presentation concerns the issue of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) as a tool or enabler as well as producer of democratization in relation to Swedish flexible distance education in late 1990s and early 2000s. The overall question is how personalisation is produced in the specific practise of flexible learning, through specific rationalities and technologies of governing. The fifth presentation concerns the tension between mediating fundamental values, as they are constructed in a closed totality, a canon, and exerting symbolic violence, in Sweden. The prevailing dominance for considering school as a social meeting place risks generating exclusion if it does not consider those power circumstances that at the same time confuse the social with the moral. In this process the use of deliberative dialogues play an essential role. The final presentation concerns the educational policies of reflection. One of the main arguments used by these policies is that reflection increases learning efficiency by making the students ”aware” of their learning strategies. In this presentation, however, the presenter argues that reflection also needs to be conceived as a self-governing instrument that colonizes the learner.

Discourse analysis

Preliminary results show that personalised addressing, customization, self-regulated and self-responsible learning seem to be important governing technologies. These are built on a rationality of learner empowerment, and efficient and productive learning. Finally the ambiguities of personalisation and individualisation point to possible problems of integrity/privacy and monitoring/surveillance.The hegemony of personalisation is a way of colonializing learners as well as teachers as producers of a shared discourse of individualization.