This article seeks to elaborate on some of the understandings of ‘pædagogik’ (pedagogy) that we have observed in Jens Erik Kristensen’s article ‘Pedagogy and/or educational research and educational science’ in Nordic Studies in Education (Kristensen, 2022). In this article, we present several claims in order to argue for and be able to characterize pedagogy as a science: that pedagogy as an object of study involves an institutional perspective, that pedagogy is practiced and thus calls for empirically based and theoretically informed studies of pedagogical practice, and not least that the studies of pedagogy, according to pedagogy as a science, are critical in the sense that they seek to examine the significance of pedagogical practice, question its epistemology and make it possible to think differently.