As an adult educator, I have found home visits to be immensely helpful as an evaluation of the effectiveness of my classroom lessons. When you do lessons around nutrition, the content of shelves and refrigerators should change as a result. What better place to truly see the impact of your teachings. If you talk about childhood safety yet go to the home and see numerous unsafe items that you talked about, well it lets you know that the lesson didn’t transfer to another environment and that you need to revisit the concepts. PLUS it is wonderful to have the children and adults show you their home, special places and nick-nacks. (Tardaewether, 2002)

The above text suggests that mothering discourses not only are present in texts, but shape the ways in which educators/professionals and families interact. A visit to a home was an opportunity to “check on learning” (even on topics that have nothing to do with the school curriculum), and in this way the home becomes an extension of the classroom. The use of home visits to instill desired mothering practices is a long-standing tool for social reform, as Maria Valverde (1991) described in the context of the “purity” movement in Canada and the United States in the early Twentieth Century. For example, Valverde argued that the term social at the turn of the century was used as an “adjective” usually followed by “problem.” There was the “social” question and its answers were usually philanthropic. The “social” problems and the desire to understand them led philanthropists and researchers “into the neighbourhoods and homes of the poor (home visiting was a central practice in nineteenth century philanthropy). This investigation began with kitchens, clothes and cupboards of the poor, but it did not end there” (Valverde, 1991, p. 21). While the use of home visits to check on literacy practices may not be designed to pry into sexual desire, it is still worth considering whether “literacy” had taken the place of “morality” or more generally the “social” as the frame for naming and acting upon persistent social problems that arise from our economic system.

It is in this way that the desired social visions are enacted through women’s domestic literacy work, and regulated by social agencies. This vision positions literacy and mothering as solutions to social problems of the neo-liberal nation-state. Foremost among these “problems” was the performance of schools, and a key area for women’s domestic literacy work was to uphold parental involvement in schools, the primary role of which was ensuring their children could read, helping with homework and volunteering and fund raising. Indeed, it is in the interface between home and school that mothers, and low-income mothers in particular, were most subject to surveillance and regulation.