This special issue of Critical Studies in Education brings together a range of contemporary engagements with young people, popular, cultural and ‘public pedagogies’ (Giroux Citation1999, Citation2000, Citation2001a, Citation2001b, Citation2001c, Citation2004a, Citation2004b, Citation2004c, Citation2005, Citation2006) and associated scholarship around formal and ‘informal sites of learning’ (Ellsworth Citation2002, Citation2005), in order to explore how different pedagogical experiences occur. The edition features a variety of approaches that open up this emerging field to new forms of inquiry. Situated within broader debates about pedagogy and dominant scholarly assumptions concerning how pedagogy is conceived and debated, this collection questions what we might perceive pedagogical processes or spaces to be. The common theme is a conception of pedagogy that is both stronger in terms of social implications and wider in terms of its permeation across social contexts than conventional uses of the term allow. Here we use the expression ‘pedagogy writ large’ to capture a general set of theoretical conceptualizations – ‘public pedagogy’, ‘cultural pedagogy’ and so on – which seek to frame pedagogy in this broader sense. The wide-ranging uses of pedagogy in this collection can be helpfully introduced through an examination of the theoretical lineages and contestations of pedagogy ‘writ large’. We therefore begin by situating this issue in relation to scholarly traditions that establish a strong and generalized concept of pedagogy before considering connections with other bodies of scholarship. We review connections with theories of socialization, the field of cultural studies and conventional definitions of pedagogy. We argue that an appreciation of these connections is needed to clarify the usefulness and potential of broader conceptualizations of pedagogy, which nonetheless have some conceptual precision.