Private supplementary tutoring, widely known as shadow education, has become a global enterprise, challenging the traditional boundaries of the educational landscape. The concept of shadow education refers to educational activities, which are related to school subjects and are provided by private tutors outside school hours, usually in exchange for a fee (Bray, 1999). The last decades saw the research on shadow education gaining in popularity; however, due to methodological challenges shadow education is still understudied and remains largely undertheorized.

Recently, several studies have theorized the nature and the demands for shadow education by deploying the concepts of curriculum studies (Bray, Kobakhidze, Zhang, & Liu, 2018; Forsberg et al, 2019; Jokić, 2013; Kim, 2016; Kim & Jung, 2019; Sriprakash, Proctor, & Hu, 2016). The present paper joins this line of research. Drawing on findings from previous research and the ongoing PhD project, it provides a conceptual framework for analyzing and understanding the relationship between public education and private tutoring.

From the perspective of curriculum theory, hiring a tutor can be seen as a strategic response  arising from an individual’s experiences or encounters with public education and from a mismatch between one’s own educational needs, aspirations and desires, and the preordained curriculum. The present paper exemplifies how the variety of manifestations and functions of private tutoring can be explained in terms of the (perceived) gaps between planned and enacted curriculum on the one hand, or between enacted and attained curricula on the other. However, since curriculum theory traditionally has been most concerned with public education, the explanatory capacity of the established terms (i.e. planned, enacted and attained curriculum) is limited; in particular, they tend to overlook the capability of the targeted subjects of education to refuse, contest, challenge and go beyond the prescribed set of knowledge. With this in mind, I endeavor to introduce a new concept - a desired curriculum – for exploring the tensions between structure and agency in education in general and for theorizing shadow education in particular. Together, these conceptual and analytical tools seem well suited for exploring how school curriculum is both reproduced and resisted in shadow education.

References

Bray, M. (1999). The Shadow Education System: Private Tutoring and its Implications for Planners. Paris: UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP).

Bray, M., Kobakhidze, M. N., Zhang, W., & Liu, J. (2018). The hidden curriculum in a hidden marketplace: Relationships and values in Cambodia’s shadow education system. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 50(4), 1–21.

Forsberg, E., Mikhaylova, T., Hallsén, S., & Melander Bowden, H. (2019). Supplementary tutoring in Sweden and Russia: A safety net woven with numbers. In C. Elde Mølstad & D. Pettersson (Eds.), New Practices of Comparison, Quantification and Expertise in Education: Conducting Empirically Based Research (pp. 207–229). London & New York: Routledge.

Jokić, B. (Ed.). (2013). Emerging from the shadow: A Comparative Qualitative Exploration of Private Tutoring in Eurasia. Zagreb: Network of Education Policy Centers.

Kim, Y. (2016). Shadow education and the curriculum and culture of schooling in South Korea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kim, Y. C., & Jung, J.-H. (2019). Conceptualizing shadow curriculum: Definition, features and the changing landscapes of learning cultures. Journal of Curriculum Studies, (Journal Article), 1–21.

Sriprakash, A., Proctor, H., & Hu, B. (2016). Visible pedagogic work: Parenting, private tutoring and educational advantage in Australia. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(3), 426–441.