Teaching Beyond Normalisation: Rethinking Standards-Based Reforms Through Canguilhem

Standards-based reforms (SBRs), such as the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST), have reshaped teachers’ work and redefined what counts as professional judgement and pedagogic practice. In this paper, we reflect on the logic of remedyism embedded in SBR policies such as the APST, through the theoretical lens of the French philosopher Georges Canguilhem. While such policies are widely understood to normalise teachers’ work in a Foucauldian sense, we argue, following Canguilhem, that it is equally important to foreground pedagogic normativity—that is, the capacity of schools and teachers to create context-specific pedagogic practices and possibilities, within complex social realities, through the creation of their own norms, often in the silence of policy technologies. This conception does not endorse normalisation; rather, it resists the technical and performative deployment of teaching standards in policy enactment, which tends to homogenise, universalise, and standardise pedagogy. Teaching, from this perspective, is better understood as a creative enterprise that demands continual modification of pedagogic designs and interactions, in response to the changing needs of students, education systems, and social milieus.