Pedagogy, most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political, and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as an academic discipline, is the study of how knowledge and skills are imparted in an educational context, and it considers the interactions that take place during learning. Both the theory and practice of pedagogy vary greatly as they reflect different social, political, and cultural contexts.
Woman teaching geometry (detail of a XIV-century illuminated manuscript, at the beginning of Euclid's Elementa, in the translation attributed to Adelard of Bath)
Germany: A kindergarten teacher facilitates play for a group of children (1960).
Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, non-human animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kind of learning in certain plants. Some learning is immediate, induced by a single event, but much skill and knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences. The changes induced by learning often last a lifetime, and it is hard to distinguish learned material that seems to be "lost" from that which cannot be retrieved.
American students learning how to make and roll sushi
A depiction of the world's oldest continually operating university, the University of Bologna, Italy
Future school (1901 or 1910)
