Decolonizing educational/curriculum studies in East Asia: problematizing shadow education in South Korea
JUNG Jung-Hoon
ABSTRACT This essay review critically engages Young Chun Kim’s book, Shadow Education and the Curriculum and Culture of Schooling in South Korea, by responding to two central questions at its heart: What does decolonization of educational research mean and what does it look like? In what way can cultural studies of countries with histories of colonized educational systems challenge the inertia to recapitulate colonized historical consciousness? Kim provides theoretical and empirical foundations for generating intellectual space that reveals the dialectical relationship between the dominant modes of discourse in educational research and aspirations of the colonized to envision their own educational culture and history.
KEYWORDS: Shadow education; curriculum; culture, South Korea, decolonization, internationalization, academic achievement, curriculum studies
Notes on contributor
Jung-Hoon Jung teaches at the Department of Education of Chonnam National University, South Korea. His research interests include curriculum theorizing, teacher education, inter-cultural studies, and autobiographical inquiry. He is the author of The Concept of Care in Curriculum Studies: Juxtaposing Currere and Hakbeolism (Jung 2016) among other works. He co-authored Ugly Duckling: First Year Elementary School Teachers’ Lives (Kim, Jung, and Lee 2006) and co-translated Sleeter and Grant’s Making Choices for Multicultural Education (2007/2009). His works attempt to resist theoretically and practically the instrumental rationality in education.