Worldwide shadow education epidemic and its move toward shadow curriculum

Abstract

Shadow education has become a widespread phenomenon worldwide and is now an unavoidable learning space for many students. It challenges the traditional notion of factory-like one-size-fits-all education and provides students with more personalized learning. Moreover, it goes beyond shadowing the formal education and holds a mirror up to the formal education to reveal its shortcomings. Although more studies worldwide are focusing on the phenomenon, its scope, characteristics, history, and functionality remain underexplored. Therefore, shadow education should be considered as an emerging focus of recent curriculum studies and should not be disregarded by researchers who attempt to understand where, how, what, and with whom students learn. The present article elaborates on a new conceptualization of ‘shadow education’ and one of its components, ‘shadow curriculum’, which is a new focus of curriculum studies aiming for individual students’ academic success in formal education. First, we deal with shadow education and its forms and features, and then move toward the concept and characteristics of shadow curriculum.