Shadow Education as Worldwide Curriculum Studies

“Young Chun Kim and Jung-Hung Jung’s volume is an impressive exegesis on ways to think alternatively within the decolonial path. It is undeniably one of most powerful and brilliant approaches on ‘decoloniality otherwise’ in East Asia, which helps better understand the challenges decolonial thinkers faced in the struggle to open the canon of modern Western Eurocentric epistemologies.”
—Joao M. Paraskeva, Professor of College of Arts and Sciences, University of Massachusetts, USA

 “By articulating the concept of shadow curriculum, this book opens up possibilities for advancing the burgeoning field of research on shadow education or private supplementary tutoring.”
—Karen Dooley, Associate Professor of Education, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

“Kim and Jung challenge us to rethink our approach to researching shadow education by lifting the lid on the ‘black box’ of curriculum. They argue forcefully that established interpretations of this crucial sector take insufficient account of its complexity, diversity, and cultural dimensions.”
—Edward Vickers, Associate Professor of Comparative Education, Kyushu University, Japan

This book theorizes shadow education as a new component of curriculum, expanding the concept of curriculum to include this type of learning. Curriculum scholars and theorists have largely disregarded shadow education as a valid topic of scholarly attention despite its massive growth worldwide. But shadow education has become a global phenomenon with ever-increasing numbers of student participants; it complements school-based curricula, in many cases going beyond. Thus, Jung and Kim argue that shadow education requires rigorous analysis by curriculum studies scholars. This volume analyzes the state and importance of shadow education in countries around the world: its representative forms and industries (private tutoring institutes, home-visit private tutoring, Internet-based private tutoring, subscribed learning programs, after-school programs), its characteristic forms in terms of curriculum, and its roles in student learning. It also explores various features of shadow education based on an eight-year ethnographic study in South Korea.