What is pedagogy, anyway?

Thanks to recent approval from my adviser, my Master's project study is now in motion! Taking a hobby I picked up in Germany, that turned into a passion during my time at IslandWood, I'm now able to go one step further with the topic of storytelling. Specifically, I will be extending on my IW independent study on Storytelling as Pedagogy to study and write about Storytellers as Pedagogues.

Howard Terpning's "The Storyteller"

What is a pedagogue, you ask? This is, as it turns out, a very good question - one that I found myself discussing with my housemate, a fellow grad student in Education. We found that this very common term - indeed, pedagogy is the very field we are studying - evoked different ideas in each of our minds. She equated pedagogues with teachers, and pedagogy with a method of teaching instruction. I - and this may be due to the immense amount of philosophy I'm reading for one of my classes - feel pedagogy goes beyond curriculum and instruction to examine underlying philosophical questions and ideas of our educational model. In other words, teaching instruction implies educational practice while pedagogy embodies educational philosophy.

However, I may very well stand corrected! Consulting the dictionary, we found a definition that read: "1. The function or work of a teacher; 2. The art or science of teaching." Looking at the etymology of the word, the first paedagogio was a slave that served as supervisor of the education of his master's children (I'll avoid any connections teachers today might make to that historical example ...). And yet, when one thinks of historical pedagogues, a mixture of psychologists, philosophers, and teachers comes to mind: Benjamin Bloom, John Dewey, Paolo Freire, and Maria Montessori to mention just a few examples from the 20th century.

And so, perhaps we might better think of pedagogy as the link between educational philosophy and practice - that is, the sum of ideas about teaching and learning that inform how teachers and schools facilitate learning in their classrooms [or comparable learning environments]. However, I still can't, with confidence, equate pedagogues with teachers and educators, simply because of my initial philosophical slant.

Let's get back to my study on storytellers. The question of pedagogues originated from a question of framework: do I want to frame the study as an understanding of storytellers as practitioners of a pedagogy or as thinkers about a pedagogy? They are, undoubtedly, both, and I may, in the end, be making more work for myself than necessary. But, hey, what's wrong with a little mental exercise now and then? Please weigh in with your comments!