In this paper we put forward a ‘standard for dissensus’ that seeks to identify the consensus about what counts in and as education and look for ways to think again about these matters. We will delineate what the contents of such a standard might be. Why would we do this? In common with a range of international contexts, some European teacher education systems have embraced teacher professional standards as vehicles for codifying and developing the work of teachers (Koster & Dengerink, 2015; Page, 2015; Pedaste, Leijen, Poom-Valickis & Eisenschmidt, 2019). The putative rationale for developing professional standards is that they provide a shared language for talking about teachers, teaching and learning, and thus serve as a common reference point for pedagogical, professional and promotion-related conversations. At the same time, critical questions have been raised about the potential of standards as vehicles, not just for professional development, but for monitoring and controlling teachers (Sachs, 2003; Taylor, 2022). Concerns have also been raised regarding the degree to which standards inhibit professional autonomy and creativity - as Taubman pithily puts it (2009, p. 117) in his aptly named book, Teaching by numbers, “standards serve to standardize work”. Professional standards can also be seen as part of a trend to turn teaching from a moral, ethical and politically informed practice to a technical matter of implementing official knowledge and curriculum, thereby de-contesting, de-intellectualising and de-educationalizing education (see Biesta, 2021 on the rise of the discourse of learning). Standards also suggest that there is a consensus about what is important in education; that the purposes and practices of education are widely agreed upon and as a result it seems that they cannot easily become subject to debate. In this paper our goal is to offer a resource for teacher educators to be able to question this consensus and to consider what it is that standardised approaches to education are asking of us (and our students)- remembering that standards are designed to be met, not to be brought into question.

We join in the critique of standardisation in education, but we do so taking an ‘additive’ approach (see Savransky and Stengers, 2018) where we develop resources for use with teacher education students that may open up new lines of thinking about the purposes and practices of education. To this end, we also enter into the ongoing discussion about what counts as education and who it is that decides this (see Biesta, 2011; Yosef-Hassidim, 2021). Our work here supports an approach to standardisation ‘from below’ where it is the people whose work is the subject of standards who decide what is to be standardised and how this is to be enacted (with what outcomes, and so on) (see Heimans et al, 2021).

A ‘new’ standard of educational dissensus

1. Knowing the system

         Whose interests does it serve?

         Who is systemically marginalised?

2. Knowing ‘education’

Where are the ‘edges’ of knowledge about education?

(How) Can you speak about education from an education point of view?

3. Knowing how to change the system

What, where, how and who has been able to change the system before?

         How can you organise safe resistance to the system?

4. Knowing education in relation to other governed entities

How is education known about?

Who has control over this and how can this control be contested?

5. Knowing what is sensible and what is not in education

         What are the ways in which sense is distributed?

         Who is it whose only part in this distribution is none?

         How might the part of the no part take one? (Where, when, who- how named?)

This is a conceptual paper. We base our suggestions for a ‘new’ standard on conceptualisations of dissensus. Our goal is to investigate how we might enter into the relations of governance that standardisation enacts in order to have an effect on and in these relations. Specifically, standardisation in education enacts social orders that, we argue, should not be taken for granted and the resources that we develop and enumerate are designed to fracture the sense of such orders, revealing in the process the arbitrariness of their constitution (see Rancière, 2013). We draw on Rancière (2010) and Verran’s (2015) thinking to inform the development of a standard that teacher educators might use with their students to unsettle what is valorised when education has been standardised. From Rancière, we utilise three concepts; 1. The part of the no part, 2. The (re)distribution of the sensible), 3. The presupposition of equality. From Verran (2015) (whose scholarship involves investigating confrontations between Australian Indigenous, and ‘Western’ ‘scientific’, epistemic practices), we draw on an approach to dissensus which involves “thinking of objects of governance [for example teacher/ teaching practices and their standardisation] as events, as expressions of a collective going-on together in a particular here and now”, which “offers a means to consider the ethics and politics of a particular going-on doing difference together” (Verran, 2015, p. 52). Verran (2015) suggests, “A politics of dissensus, like any politics is concerned with ‘What particular choices present in this here and now?’, ‘What is at stake in those choices?’ ‘How might those choices be made?’” (p. 54). “Unlike the politics of consensus where those questions are ruled out of play after a consensus has been agreed, in dissensus those questions continue to remain active. Assenting here and now in going on together doing this, is limited and contingent. There is shared recognition that what we do together is subject to a continuing and active deferral of the always hovering possibility of withdrawing assent, of stopping things in their tracks” (Verran, 2015, p. 54).

We do not intend to propose how such a standard might be used, but instead offer it as a way to invite speculation about what (and who) counts in, and as, education and why. As Bowker and Starr (1999) remind us “[E]ach standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another. This is not inherently a bad thing-indeed it is inescapable. But it is an ethical choice, and as such it is dangerous-not bad, but dangerous”. (1999, p. 5-6). In this paper we have proposed resources for investigating the valorization of some points of view in education and the silencing of others. Our goal rather has been to open up thought about the contemporary desire for practices of standardization in education and suggest a resource that takes the danger of such work seriously.

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