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Research on curriculum and shadow education (also known as private or supplementary tutoring) is increasing and diversifying. Shadow education can be understood as out-of-school formal education. Although separate from the school program, it is directed toward that program. Shadow education often targets aspects of the curriculum of mass schooling that are most tightly controlled by the state through curricular prescription and high-stakes assessment. In terms of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, that control can be understood as the “institutionalization” of curriculum in an educational “field.” Internationally, shadow education suppliers variously prepare students for assessments that are conducted in school, are authorized by the state to award the institutionalized cultural capital of grades, or are otherwise involved in partnerships with schools. Since the 1990s, policy-oriented researchers (many influenced by the research synthesis work of Mark Bray in forums of global educational governance) have addressed impacts of shadow education on curricula. They have identified risks to the curricular work of state, bureaucracy, and school, highlighting impacts on the efficacy of systemic equity measures designed to extend the benefits of schooling to all. More recently, Young Chun Kim, Jung-Hoon Jung, and colleagues have been bringing postcolonial, feminist, and critical traditions of curriculum scholarship to the study of shadow education. Offering a critique of the Eurocentric normativities of global agenda in educational practice and research, they celebrate the use of shadow education in East Asia, and studies of the benefits of such. Neither of the two extant strands of research on shadow education and curriculum have attended to curriculum as institutionalized formal education. To rectify this, it is useful to articulate concepts about the making and remaking of the content of formal education developed by Michael Connelly, Jean Clandinin, and Water Doyle to Bourdieusian theory. This enables understanding of the curriculum-making work of instructors and students, as well as program writers and policymakers, in fields and subfields of education that involve school and shadow education organizations. Among other things, this perspective offers ways of understanding the work of shadow education in the construction of subject matter content in instructional, programmatic, and institutional domains of curriculum.

It is well-understood that systems of education tend to disproportionately benefit already advantaged social groups. Students have been positioned in recent reform efforts as agents with the right to be involved in decision-making on an increasing range of issues related to their education, in practices commonly termed “student voice” in policy, practice, and research. Student voice has been argued to be a mechanism to intervene in educational inequalities and a means to enhance students’ choices at school. Student voice is frequently represented as a neutral proposition: that is, that students’ involvement in decision-making will directly benefit both the school and the students themselves. This apparently neutral proposition elides how, in practice, some students may benefit from experiences of “student voice” more than others. Critiques of student voice, as well as contemporary calls for a return to class analysis in education, compel attention to the potential ways that student voice practices can aggravate existing inequalities. Classed dynamics contour even well-intentioned attempts to intervene in educational inequalities. The dynamic experience of class has shifted in relation to student voice across contexts and over time, particularly in individualistic, market-driven educational systems structured by the rhetoric of “choice.” Further research into the shifting nature of class in relation to student voice may include longitudinal processes of “studying up” to understand how student voice can be mobilized to cultivate educational advantage and distinction in class-privileged schooling contexts. What is also needed is a renewed uptake of the concept of class consciousness in student-voice practice—that is, beyond voice as a strategy to personalize individual students’ learning and toward enactments of student voice as collective work—if student voice is to disrupt the reproduction of structural inequalities through schooling.

The French social Pierre Bourdieu became known as a key sociologist of education in the 1970s, contributing seminal books and articles to the “new” sociology of education, which focuses on knowledge formation in the classroom and institutional relations. His own social background was modest, but he rose through the elite French schools to become a leading intellectual in the second half of the 20th century. His early studies dealt with Algeria, which he had experienced firsthand in the 1950s at a time of their war of independence. Issues of education and culture grew out of his field studies and formed the basis of further early work in the 1960s. Subsequently, he developed a wider research corpus, which considered the French state and society as a whole: cultural consumption, politics, religion, law, economics, literature, art, fashion, media, and philosophy. Bourdieu developed a highly original “theory of practice” and set of conceptual thinking tools: habitus, field, and cultural capital. His approach sought to rise above conventional oppositions between subjectivism and objectivism. Structure as both structured and structuring was a central principle to this epistemology. Early studies of university students focused on the role that education played in social class reproduction and the place of language in academic discourse. For him, pedagogy was a form of “symbolic violence,” played out in the differential holdings of “cultural capital” that the students held with respect to each other and the dominant ethos of schooling. He undertook further extensive studies of French higher education and elite training schools. He was involved in various education review committees and put forward a number of principles for change in curricula, all while accepting that genuine reform was extremely challenging. He catalogued some of the tensions and conflicts of contemporary education policy. Both his discoveries and conceptual terms still offer researchers powerful tools for analyzing and understanding all national education systems and the particular individual practical contexts within them.