Parlo Singh

Education for all children, including those with a disability, is well established as a human right on the international stage (United Nations 1948; United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultura...

This paper examines codes of conduct (CoC) policies specifically designed to regulate the professional practice and pedagogical work of teachers in Australian vocational education and training (VET...

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.

This paper reports on one teacher’s adoption and adaption of pre-packaged teaching plans when teaching early years literacy. We hone in on Ms Jordan’s (pseudonym) work as an adaptive professional who personalises curriculum enactment for her highly diverse student cohort through continual changes to resource selection, pedagogy and assessment. Qualitative case study data consist of transcripts made during Ms Jordan’s interviews with the researchers, as they discuss the Australian Curriculum: English and how to meet the instructional needs of the diverse student cohort. Vaughn et al.’s (Vaughn et al., Educational Researcher 51:186–196, 2022) Adaptive Teaching Inventory (ATI) provides the analytical lens to make visible the adaptations Ms Jordan enacted during the planning for and teaching of phonic and spelling knowledge, including the assessment of students’ learning. The findings are that the pre-packaged teaching plans provided guidance and a selection of resources to support planning, but it is the teacher’s adaptive professionalism that guides decisions pertaining to resource selection, pedagogical practice and orientations to assessment to provide students with personalised learning experiences aligned to the Australian Curriculum: English. Ms Jordan, as the adaptive professional, is held responsible for deep levels of knowledge of students’ needs and knowledge of students’ backgrounds, alongside more contemporary beliefs about planning for teaching and adapting teaching within the moments of lessons (Vaughn et al., Educational Researcher 51:186–196, 2022).