A study of literacy advice necessarily implies the study of literacy policy
and research. The three strands are inter-textually and discursively linked.
This study brings a critical and socio-historical perspective to “reading”
literacy education research and policy. According to Edmonston (2001), a functionalist
perspective seeks to answer “what works”
and tends to exclude consideration
of the complex external factors that impact literacy education. Edmonston argues
that “Critical analysis of literacy education research asks different
questions: Where a policy or perspective comes from, why it is viable, and what
the values embedded in that policy might be”
(p. 621). Where literacy
advice comes from is thus a central question in this study, one that is inter-textually
connected to the origins and desires of literacy policy and research and their
discursive shifts over time. These inter-textual relationships between policy,
research, popular culture, and advice are difficult to tease apart, but are
central to a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis, and central to understanding
how some forms of mothering and literacy are circulated as “true”
and “normal” while others are marginalized.
In this way, the study brings together the three inter-related conceptual
strands of context, inter-textuality, and discourse that Maybin (2000) has cited
as important to understanding the ways in which institutional power “reaches
into the very grain of individuals, touch their bodies and inserts itself in
their actions and attitudes their discourses, learning processes and everyday
lives”
(Foucault, 1980, cited in Maybin, 2000, p. 208). The conceptual
lenses introduced above, and their articulation with the analytic methods adopted
in this study, are elaborated in Chapter Two.