The discourses of intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family constituted the discursive framework for analyzing literacy advice and provided a consistent structure through which to gauge continuities and shifts in themes that became attached to ideals of the “mother as teacher of literacy” over time. Before reflecting on the limitations of this study and areas for further research, I will briefly review the approaches to discourse analysis, and accompanying analytic lenses that guided this thesis.
According to Foucault, discourses are located in historical and cultural systems
of knowledge, which are produced and reproduced through relations of power:
“whoever is able to disseminate and impose his or her version of reality
(through discourse) has power”
(Kalman, in Taylor, 1997, p. 52). Foucault
argued that the distinguishing features of discourses are not only that they
are political, but that they are intertwined with our social and political identities
in ways that mask their power to define, delimit, and/or erase individual lived
experiences. It is through this power, Foucault (1977) argued, that discourses
regulate social behaviour, values, and practices.
Political relationships are at the centre of critical discourse analysis.
According to Gee, politics is at play where people are deciding and communicating
which social goods have status, and how these social goods should be distributed.
Such decisions are based on particular perspectives: “…what is
(p. 2) This point was made by Maynard (1998)
when he stated, “normal”
and what is not, what is “acceptable”
and what is not; what is “possible”
and what is not, what “people like us”
or “people like them”
do or don’t do…”“Thinking of discourses as practices rather than solely
as texts — or to put it another way, thinking of discourses as texts that
work — is one way to capture something of the materiality of discourse”
(Maynard, 1998, p. 599).
The premise that discourses are political implies that critical discourse
analysis is also concerned with social justice. Locating this study from outside
the field of education, as a lens into the discursive construction of mothers
in literacy discourse, provided insights into the benefits and importance of
a historical approach to understanding contemporary literacy policy and practice.
This highlights the contribution that a genealogical approach to critical discourse
analysis can bring to critically engaging with and interrupting power/knowledge
in contemporary literacy practice. As described in Chapter Two, literacy researchers
such as Fairclough (1995), Gee (1999), and Rogers (2003) used strategies of
critical discourses analysis to understand how language works as a cultural
practice to “mediate relationships between power and privilege,”
as these are instantiated in everyday learning settings and institutions. Gee
(2004), in an argument endorsed by Rogers, Malanchuruvil-Berkes, Mosley, Huie,
and O’Garro Joseph (2005), claimed that “Critical Discourse Analysis
(CDA) refers to
(Rogers, et al., 2005, p. 367). “a brand of analysis associated with Fairclough, Hodge,
Kress, Wodak, van Dijk and van Leeuwen, and followers. Lowercase “critical
discourse analysis includes a ‘wider array of approaches’”