Abstract

This article continues the efforts of Gert Biesta and Jim Hordern to address the nature and organisation of educational studies as highlighted in a recent special issue titled ‘Educational studies today and for the future: threats, hopes, and collaborations’ in BJES (Volume 7, No. 5, 2023). The aim is to articulate a distinctive voice or language within the study of education, addressing contemporary challenges in the field. Invoking German Pädagogik and American educationalist Schwab’s theory of the Practical, this article makes a case for pedagogy as a distinctive discipline of education that has its own ways of thinking and theorising, centred on questions as to the purpose of education and the nature of educational practice. Furthermore, it asserts that pedagogy is a ‘practical’ discipline centred on understanding and developing educational practice. Conceived in this way, pedagogy can serve as a core and unifying component in educational studies, integrating the foundation disciplines and other subjects into the study of practice. It also functions as the ‘crowning’ discipline that organises foundation disciplines and related sources toward the professional education of teachers.