This absence in advice of the situated context in which child raising is located
was similarly evidenced in the Parents are Learners
campaign of the Canadian Home-School Federation. First launched as the “Literacy
in the Information Age”
campaign in 1991, to encourage parental involvement
in their children’s school, the PALS project consisted of parent education
workshops and a binder of fact sheets with advice on supporting their children’s
literacy. Some of these fact sheets had first been developed in the 1967 Centennial
Reading Project described in Chapter Six. The fact that literacy advice
from the 1960s could be recycled for use in parent education classes in the
1990s suggests that perhaps views of what constitutes ideal domestic literacy
practices have not changed as much as the perceived role of literacy in children’s
lives has changed. As pointed out earlier, there is a striking similarity in
the content of family literacy advice texts from government institutions of
the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. This suggests not only that
many family literacy texts were generated from the same research studies and
institutions, but that their terminology and common sense assumptions are recycled
and reused with little attention to context, culture, or target audience.
Up to now, this chapter has considered advice to middle-class mothers. But a significant feature of literacy advice discourses in the 1990s was its surveillance of low-income and minority mothers who, according to literacy advice provide by the National Center for Family Literacy and other dominant sources of literacy advice, posed the most “risk” to their children’s literacy development because they often had low levels of formal education. Discourses of the normal family, intensive mothering, and domestic pedagogy were reinforced through regulatory practices such as home visits and the tying of literacy education to back-to-work welfare programs.
In 1995, Trelease published a fourth edition of the Read Aloud Handbook and
while his advice remained similar to previous editions, his introductory chapter
on “why read aloud”
was updated to include concerns that Americans,
in their unwillingness to read (or at least purchase) books, were therefore
not “smart”
and thus unable to keep pace with a changing economy.
He asserted, “While American children are not getting smarter, those in
other countries are”
(Trelease, 1995, p. 5). Most significantly, Trelease’s
advice came in the format of anecdotes about families he had read about in newspapers;
anecdotes that read in similar ways to the morality tales of nineteenth-century
advice, particularly in their dividing strategies between academically successful
children whose mothers practiced intensive mothering and appropriate domestic
literacy management and who lived in a “normal family,”
and “failing”
children, whose mothers did not engage in these strategies. Trelease commented
on the unequal conditions for learning available to poor children with respect
to their more well-off counterparts, but argued that the real inequality “began
in their homes”
(p. 22). He supported this contention by describing the
domestic literacy practices of a grandmother who cared for her four grandchildren,
one of whom was nine year old Darnell. Overcrowding, lack of a structured routine,
and a TV turned on in the kitchen while Darnell did his homework, was testimony
to her inadequate domestic literacy management skills and thus Darnell’s
difficulty in school.