The Many Meanings of Social Pedagogy: pedagogy and social theory in Scandinavia

Abstract

In the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish languages pedagogy is the common term for education as a field of knowledge in relation to teacher education as well as in the universities and in the research system. A characteristic feature of pedagogy is that it is partly conceptualized and organized as a professional field of knowledge represent a possibility for the outgrowth of highly different trajectories for the development of the field as a whole as well as for subfields. In discourses on education and schooling in Scandinavia slogans like dialogue pedagogy, alternative pedagogy, social pedagogy, critical pedagogy and contextual pedagogy have been in frequent use since the early 1970s. While this tendency during the last few decades to reconceptualize pedagogy as a social science has been closely affiliated to general intellectual trends after the student radicalization of the 1960s, it also echoes earlier attempts to formulate programmes for a subfield in education which is often named social pedagogy.