Shadow education as an emerging focus in worldwide curriculum studies

Shadow education has been studied in areas such as comparative education, educational policy, sociology of education, education and economics, and lifelong education, but mainstream Anglophone curriculum studies have largely ignored this phenomenon. We argue that shadow education should be considered as an emerging (and significant) focus of curriculum studies worldwide and advance five approaches to studying shadow education as an object of transnational curriculum inquiry, including shadow education as historical/political text, auto/biographical text, critical text, ethnic text, and decolonising text. We argue that, because shadow education seems likely to expand, curriculum scholars should seek new understandings that might complicate and complexify both shadow education and mainstream curriculum discourses. example, a relatively recent shadow education-related cultural phenomenon emerges in Park et al.’s (2015, p. 5) study of South Korean “Gangnam mothers”, who work individually or collectively to find the best education-related information in order to get their child the most suitable educational support. One implication of their study for understanding shadow education as decolonising text is that it is a space in which multiple agents create a new culture of education through active engagement with others. How this emerging culture will affect or interact with shadow education is largely a matter of speculation. Representing shadow education in South Korea as “educational fever” is a Western (i.e., colonialist) construction of the Other which we need to go beyond. In this respect, the strategies that indigenous peoples can use in decolonising research methodologies (see, for example, Smith, 2013) might also inform the project of understanding shadow education as decolonising text.