Shadow education has been studied in areas such as comparative education, educational policy, sociology of education, education and economics, and lifelong education, but mainstream Anglophone curriculum studies have largely ignored this phenomenon. We argue that shadow education should be considered as an emerging (and significant) focus of curriculum studies worldwide and advance five approaches to studying shadow education as an object of transnational curriculum inquiry, including shadow education as historical/political text, auto/biographical text, critical text, ethnic text, and decolonising text. We argue that, because shadow education seems likely to expand, curriculum scholars should seek new understandings that might complicate and complexify both shadow education and mainstream curriculum discourses.