Recent decades have seen a widespread ‘technification’ of education (Selwyn, 2021), with digital technologies now part of the fabric of schooling and schools. This technification has encompassed the domain of school discipline, whereby education platforms, such as ClassDojo, are increasingly adopted by teachers to ‘manage’ student behaviour (Manolev et al., 2019). Its presence too has emerged in inclusive education with technology seen as a way to support its advancement (Hersh, 2020). The aim of this paper brings these two areas together by, a) reporting findings from an Australian study which investigated the ways teachers used ClassDojo to enact school discipline practices and, b) considering these findings in relation to educational exclusion/inclusion. Little is known about the ways teachers use ClassDojo to discipline students, and the influence it is having on school discipline practices. Research into the impact of data-centric platforms is emerging; however, there remains a pressing need to understand how they are shaping classroom practices ‘on the ground’ (Knox et al., 2019). We draw on Foucault’s analytics of power to interpret our findings and to understand how power is exercised through ClassDojo. In particular, we use Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power and panopticism to explain how disciplinary power is exercised through ClassDojo’s platform architecture via processes, practices, and techniques of surveillance and visibility (Foucault, 1977). This critical qualitative inquiry used a multimethod data collection approach: online documentary research, unobtrusive online observations, and semi-structured interviews. Documentary data included website content, weblog posts, instructional videos, and school policies. Observations were conducted in online news webpages and weblogs and focussed on reader comments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven South Australia primary school teachers. A hybrid iterative inductive-deductive thematic analysis was used to analyse data (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006; Tracy, 2013). The study found that teachers often used ClassDojo’s platform as a surveillance technology to monitor and make students visible for the purpose of shaping their behaviour. Furthermore, the surveillance practices teachers employed were at times combined with practices of exclusion as a form of punishment. Therefore, we argue that these findings indicate that the use of ClassDojo as a school discipline technology is introducing into schools ‘more pervasive and intrusive patterns of surveillance and regulation’ (Slee, 1995, p.3) which promote, facilitate, and are being used to exclude.

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