The datafication of education is an expanding international phenomenon (Jarke & Breiter 2019). Contributing to this expansion is ClassDojo, a digital educational platform designed to help teachers with classroom management and communication that has had ‘huge international penetration into schools’ (Williamson 2019). ClassDojo offers a variety of features and has been described as a ‘school-based social media platform’ (Williamson 2017) that incorporates a prominent gamified behaviour-shaping function’ (Manolev, Sullivan & Slee, 2019, p 37). This paper reports a study that investigated the ways in which ClassDojo is being used in schools. We adopted a critical orientation in this research that attended to the workings of power (Popkewitz & Fendler 1999). The theoretical framework drew on concepts of datafication (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013), performativity (Ball 2000), and Foucault’s analytics of power (Foucault 2016; Foucault 1979). Subsequently, issues related to power, governance, and the relationship between knowledge, data and truth were central to this study. We collected publicly available material from online environments, including computer-mediated communications and school policies primarily from the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. Additionally, we conducted 7 semi-structured interviews with teachers to investigate their personal accounts on their use of ClassDojo. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. We analysed the data using an iterative hybrid inductive and deductive process (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane 2006). The findings show that teachers use a range of ClassDojo’s features in a variety of ways, but mainly to assist them with student discipline and classroom management. Our analysis showed that teachers use the features in ways that function as key disciplinary mechanisms. For example, they use a points system which create data sets on student behaviour; they generate datafied behaviour reports to make visible and examine student behaviour; and they send messages to parents about their child’s behaviour. We argue that when ClassDojo is used to enact school discipline it functions primarily as a technology of power through which the governance of students occurs. Moreover, ClassDojo is being instrumentalised in ways that are shaping pedagogical and administrative practices that function as performative and managerial modes of data-based governance (Lynch 2014), including through student behaviour data profiles and techniques of surveillance. Subsequently, when implemented in such ways, ClassDojo operates as an apparatus through which power produces reality (Foucault 1979), a reality that is generated and distributed via data-based truth claims about the student subject through the technology of school discipline.

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