The field of curriculum studies is devoted to understanding the role of curriculum in education. Yet, traditionally it has emphasized ways to improve school curricula (Pinar, 2011). This preoccupation has left the field with an excessive focus on the structure of school curricula, both internally (school subjects, assessment , and curriculum reforms) and externally (economic expectations of the society and individual job preparation). Following scholarly critiques of the field for its narrow focus, in the 1970s curriculum studies began to be reconceptualized. Since then, it has expanded to incorporate a ‘cacophony of voices’ (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995). As a result, ‘curriculum’ can now be defined in many ways.

As ‘the term curriculum [emphasis original] is many things to many people’ (Aoki, 2005a, p. 94), some have bemoaned the conceptual complexity brought about by the resulting variety in how people define and conceptualize curriculum. Yet Jung and Pinar (2016) wrote that ‘we do not see this as a terrible problem to be immediately fixed, but as the character of curriculum to be acknowledged, and celebrated’ (p. 33). Vague concepts can be highly problematic in the so-called hard sciences such as physics—but in social sciences, including curriculum studies , they may signal the ‘aliveness of the field’ (Jung & Pinar, 2016) and even be considered ‘inevitable’ in order for the field to develop (Pinar et al., 1995). In this sense, our intellectual efforts to understand curriculum are ‘unruly’—what Pinar (2015) referred to as a ‘complicated conversation.’ This book celebrates the unruliness of curriculum by focusing on a new type of curriculum: shadow curriculum , which is an individually based supplementary or enrichment curriculum provided to encourage academic success . Importantly, we consider shadow education not as a mere product of the ‘education fever’ affecting schooling in many countries, which drives parents and students to seek any means to improve achievement. But rather, we consider shadow education to be an important educational space where students—as independent agents , rather than passive individuals who merely consume existing culture of education—participate in, understand, and co-produce their learning culture. From this perspective, we endeavor to contribute new concepts and perspectives to understand shadow education without resorting to a definitive and prescriptive conceptualization of shadow education.

Curriculum studies are a complicated field: It takes a ‘deterritorialized approach’ not only to ‘challenge the secular dominant curriculum canon, but simultaneously to address in a timely manner some of the sinkholes with the very counter-dominant perspectives’ (Paraskeva & Steinberg, 2016, p. 18). The American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies Canon Project Committee referred to the hope that ‘curriculum canon of the future that will represent a plurality of diverse voices, experiences, and ideas’ (Whitlock, 2012). How can we, as curriculum scholars from the Far East, contribute to a deterritorialized approach that incorporates a plurality of diverse voices? We believe that by bringing shadow education into curriculum scholarship, we can provide a counter-narrative to dominant perspectives.

By suggesting that shadow curriculum should be incorporated into our understanding of curriculum, this book contributes to the development of curriculum studies , which has continually incorporated diverse ideas, cultures, and the phenomenon of education in different places, and is informed by various disciplines (Gough, 2003; Malewski, 2010; Slattery, 2012). Over the last few decades, the proliferation of theories and definitions of curriculum has contributed to the development of the field. The reconceptualization movement of the 1970s challenged the traditional idea of curriculum and ushered in a multi-discursive academic effort to understand curriculum (Pinar et al., 1995).

For the sake of brevity, this introduction discusses only a few of the more influential definitions of curriculum. Ellis (2004) categorized curriculum as prescriptive, descriptive, or both, while Jackson (1992) defined curriculum as ‘all experiences planned and unplanned, that occur under the auspices of the school’ including ‘unwanted outcomes of schooling ’ (p. 8) that might be associated with the hidden curriculum (Apple, 1990; Jackson, 1968; McLaren, 1994), the unstudied curriculum (Overly, 1970), the unwritten curriculum (Dreeben, 1976), the null curriculum (i.e., what is not offered, or what is sacrificed in favor of what is offered; Eisner, 1979; Flinders, Noddings, & Thornton, 1986), and the out-of-school curriculum (Schubert, 1981).

Beginning in the USA in the 1970s, various conceptualizations of curriculum became associated with political aspects of society, especially the concept of the hidden curriculum (Apple, 1979a, 1979b, 1990; Giroux, 1981a, 1981b; Liston, 1986). This began with neo-Marxist theories associated with class, hegemony, and ideology. By the 1980s, conceptualizations began to incorporate race (especially in the USA), culture (especially in Canada ), gender (Grumet, 1988), and sexuality (Pinar, 1994); by the 1990s, theories began to focus on identity politics and continue to do so (Jung & Pinar, 2016). This diversity of interpretations illustrates that curriculum cannot be understood in isolation: Curriculum involves multiple elements and contexts. It is political, cultural, and gendered (Grumet, 1988; Hendry, 2011), and incorporates psychological (Britzman, 2011; Taubman, 2011) and historical elements (Simon, 2005).

Aoki (2005b), a renowned Canadian curriculum theorist, divided curriculum into two main components: curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-lived-experience. The former refers to the bureaucratic and institutional structure of curriculum content and the structures of schooling ; the latter refers to the unique experiences in the daily lives of individual teachers and students. He noted that when curriculum is defined in abstract terms, the distinctiveness of individuals ‘disappears into the shadow’ (Aoki, 2005b, p. 160). He also stressed the need to focus on the bridge between the two components of curriculum and referred to this as dwelling in the ‘creative tensionality’ (Aoki, 2005b, p. 232), i.e., being attuned to the aliveness and immediacy of each unique situation.

Starting in the 2000s, curriculum theories began to incorporate postcolonial (Kim, Lee, & Joo, 2014; Takayama, 2017) and transnational perspectives (Gough, 2003; Pinar, 2007, 2014). Gough (2003) wrote that curriculum studies ‘might best be understood as a process of creating transnational spaces in which scholars from different localities collaborate in reframing and decentering their own knowledge traditions and negotiate trust in each other’s contributions to their collective works’ (p. 68). This kind of internationalization is in stark contrast to globalization, which Pinar defined as economic and educational standardization that can erode the uniqueness of different contexts; to Pinar, internationalization is an ‘ethical engagement with difference’ (Pinar, 2015, p. 50; also see Pinar, 2014...