Three sets of data were used in this thesis: primary documents that include best-selling child-raising manuals, popular parenting magazines, and family literacy promotional materials produced during the period under study. While child-raising manuals written by Brazelton (1974; 1989), Leach (1978; 1988; 1997), and Spock (1946; 1957; 1968; 1977; 1992; 1998) are not dedicated to reading per se, they remain widely read by parents, and, because new editions appear regularly, they provide a means for tracing insights into shifts in mainstream views about parents’ roles in literacy. Secondary sources include policy documents and theoretical and philosophical works that frame and contextualize the primary documents as evidence of shifting trends in reading research, the project of schooling, parent-school relationships, and changing views of what counts as literacy.
For example, reports of provincial commissions of education proved particularly useful as sources that articulate ideals surrounding children’s literacy and parents’ role in schooling that were current at a given time. These reports usually involve submissions from a variety of dominant institutions as well as contributions from parents and communities, and, because they tend to emerge every two decades or so, provide a useful lens into continuity and change shaping literacy advice discourses. Tertiary sources included parents’ reactions to, and experiences of, literacy advice. These are explored as counter-discourses through the analysis of on-line discussions, letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines, and auto-biographical writing done in literacy classes when these have been found. These sources are particularly relevant in the 1990s and 2000s when the Internet provided new sources for not only providing literacy advice to parents, but also gauging parents’ resistance to, and negotiation of, that advice.
Chapters Four to Seven feature the analysis of literacy advice to mothers. Throughout these chapters, I often quote long extracts from the advice texts. In a thesis concerned with exploring the relatively new project of analyzing literacy advice to mothers, the frequent inclusion of extracts from advice texts helps to make the basis for this analysis more explicit to the reader. It also allows the reader to draw her or his own interpretations from the data, and consider it along with the interpretations and arguments laid out in this thesis.