This volume tackles perceived myths surrounding the academic excellence of East Asian students, and moves beyond Western understanding to offer in-depth analysis of the crucial role that shadow education plays in students’ academic success. Featuring a broad range of contributions from countries including Japan, China, Taiwan, and Singapore, chapters draw on rich qualitative research to place in the foreground the lived experiences of students, teachers, and parents in East Asian countries. In doing so, the text provides indigenous insights into the uses, values, and meanings of shadow education and highlights unknown cultural and regional aspects, as well as related phenomena including trans-boundary learning culture, nomadic learning, individualized learning, and the post-schooling era. Ultimately challenging the previously dominating Western perspective on shadow education, the volume offers innovative theorization to highlight shadow education as a phenomenon which cannot be overlooked in broader discussion of East Asian educational performance, systems, and policy. Offering pioneering insights into the growing phenomenon of shadow education, this text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in international and comparative education, curriculum studies, and East Asian educational practices and policy. Those interested in the sociology of education and educational policy will also benefit from this book.

This volume tackles perceived myths surrounding the academic excellence of East Asian students, and moves beyond Western understanding to offer in-depth analysis of the crucial role that shadow education plays in students’ academic success. Featuring a broad range of contributions from countries including Japan, China, Taiwan, and Singapore, chapters draw on rich qualitative research to place in the foreground the lived experiences of students, teachers, and parents in East Asian countries. In doing so, the text provides indigenous insights into the uses, values, and meanings of shadow education and highlights unknown cultural and regional aspects, as well as related phenomena including trans-boundary learning culture, nomadic learning, individualized learning, and the post-schooling era. Ultimately challenging the previously dominating Western perspective on shadow education, the volume offers innovative theorization to highlight shadow education as a phenomenon which cannot be overlooked in broader discussion of East Asian educational performance, systems, and policy. Offering pioneering insights into the growing phenomenon of shadow education, this text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in international and comparative education, curriculum studies, and East Asian educational practices and policy. Those interested in the sociology of education and educational policy will also benefit from this book.

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.

In all parts of Asia, households devote considerable expenditures to private supplementary tutoring. This tutoring may contribute to students' achievement, but it also maintains and exacerbates social inequalities, diverts resources from other uses, and can contribute to inefficiencies in education systems. Such tutoring is widely called shadow education, because it mimics school systems. As the curriculum in the school system changes, so does the shadow. This study documents the scale and nature of shadow education in different parts of the region. Shadow education has been a major phenomenon in East Asia and it has far-reaching economic and social implications.

This book constitutes a sociological, anthropological, and curricular inquiry into the factors surrounding high academic achievement rates of students in South Korea. Taking root in similar studies conducted around the exemplary nature of the Finnish education model, it explores the phenomenon of success in South Korea, uniquely connecting it to the scholarship and models for examining the recent shift in attention and popularity of Korean culture. The authors argue that Korean education or "K-edu" can also be studied and understood as a Hallyu and an exemplary form of education. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative studies spanning over 15 years, the authors advance understandings of Korean academic success beyond more generalized understandings of how Asian students learn and towards a holistic explanation for the case of Korea. As such, the book challenges the perception of Korean students as passive learners with a controlled learning culture and instead advocates the ways in which Korean students are leading a changing culture by utilizing all available resources and opportunities in the space of South Korea’s evolving ecological system of education. In addition, this book provides one explanation as to how students from East Asian countries achieve such excellent academic performance. A crucial exploration of the culture and growth of education systems in Asian countries, this book will appeal to scholars and researchers with interests in Korean education and Korean students’ academic achievement as an emerging inquiry for both Korean studies and East Asian Cultural Studies. In addition, this book will also be informative for scholars of comparative education, sociology of education, educational policy, and postcolonial educational research in the world.

This volume offers insights into the role of private supplementary tutoring in the Middle East, and its far-reaching implications for social structures and mainstream education. Around the world, increasing numbers of children receive private tutoring to supplement their schooling. In much of the academic literature this is called shadow education because the content of tutoring commonly mimics that of schooling: as the curriculum changes in the schools, so it changes in the shadow. While much research and policy attention has focused on private tutoring in East Asia and some other world regions, less attention has been given to the topic in the Middle East. Drawing on both Arabic-language and English-language literature, this study commences with the global picture before comparing patterns within and among 12 Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East. It presents the educational and cultural commonalities amongst these countries, examines the drivers of demand and supply of shadow education, and considers the dynamics of tutoring and how it impacts on education in schools. In addition to its pertinence within the Middle East itself, the book will be of considerable interest to academics and education policy makers broadly concerned with changing roles of the state and private sectors in education. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book advances new ways of thinking about emergence and impact of Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT). Written by authors based in Algeria, Brazil, Chile, China, Estonia, South Korea, Spain and the USA, the chapters examine the opportunities and challenges paved by ICT in the struggle to open up and decolonize curriculum policies. The contributors show how ICT can help us to pave a new way to think about and to do curriculum theory and announce ICT as a declaration of epistemological liberation, one that helps to resist Eurocentric dominance. The chapters cover topics including, ecologies of the Global South, education discourse in South Korea, China's Curriculum Reform, and the history of colonialism in the Middle East. Building on the work of Antonia Darder, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and others, this book posits that the future of the field is the struggle against curriculum epistemicides and this is ultimately a struggle for social justice. The book includes a Foreword by the leading curriculum historian William Schubert, Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.