Why the term social pedagogies? The phrase social pedagogy has a long and complicated history. Its original origins are as a term to describe pedagogies designed to foster collective learning practices. This use quickly shifted to describe learning or education linked to the improvement of society - the education of individuals for society's benefit - and was even co-opted for the National Socialism movement under this meaning. Today it is most commonly used in social work settings to describe education of youth. Our use of social pedagogy comes closest to that embraced by Dewey who believed in the primacy of social learning in which the experience of participating within a community was an essential prerequisite for learning. This use of social pedagogy is closely linked to communities of practice. The origins of this study Our interest in social pedagogies derives from multiple sources. We have been part of several scholarship of teaching and learning groups in which faculty described pedagogies that, while superficially quite different, fostered similar learning outcomes in students; our effort to understand the common element among these different pedagogies is part of what led us to a consideration of their social aspect. We noted that intellectual development is too often cut off from the rich contexts and sense of community in which skills and knowledge operate, generate, and derive their meaning. Our use of social pedagogies is a way of rethinking classroom-based contexts as communities of practice where the social and communal dimensions are primary drivers of student engagement. We also noticed that the types of learning goals that we valued - those that privileged exposure to and practice of attitudes and approaches characteristic of adaptive expertise - were shared among these pedagogies. Adaptive expertise implies higher level skills that evidence flexibility and resourcefulness in making use of the knowledge that one possesses. The use of knowledge is typically motivated by an intrinsic sense of purpose. In turn, processes associated with adaptive expertise also serve to help experts (or in this case students) reinforce what they know by continuously testing and reinvesting in their learning as part of some progressive problem-solving task. Our use of the term social pedagogies also implies teaching contexts that are communication intensive, where students are explicitly representing knowledge for others. The nature of the social interaction implied in these contexts is in one form or another dynamic and interactive, and typically serves a critical role in guiding and building the intellectual progress of the community. Social Pedagogies, Adaptive Expertise, and Invisible Learning Behind this work we have some assumptions: Successful social pedagogies combine multiple elements. They depend in part on the combination of giving students a sense of purpose, and voice, with a real simulation (if not more) of an expert-like community and an opportunity to confront difficulty and challenges related to the knowledge domain of the course. Successful social pedagogies enact intellectual moves characteristic of adaptive expertise. Supporting and promoting social pedagogies requires understanding the intellectual moves which are too often invisible or underappreciated in higher education. Sometimes these moves are tied to affective dimensions of learning; sometimes they are simply intermediate cognitive processes that are not typically seen as the kinds of summative skills for which we assess in college classrooms. Advancing our understanding of social pedagogies requires then several things that can improve the kinds of learning we are seeking to promote: Identifying a taxonomy of the kinds of intellectual and emotional processes at work in socially-driven learning environments Sharing an understanding of how these processes fit in a broader scheme of intellectual development for students Deepening our knowledge of what kinds of evidence help represent learning Broadening our repertoire of ways to capture evidence of intermediate processes