The authors do not directly explain what theoretical bases account for the distinction between the “brand” CDA and the “wider approach” of critical discourses analysis. However, it may imply Fairclough’s (1995) distinction between the historical approach to discourse analysis adopted by Foucault, and his own “textually oriented” approach. The privileging of a “close” linguistic approach to textual analysis is evident in the definitions of CDA put forward by Rogers, Malanchuruvil-Berkes, Mosley, Huie, and O’Garro Joseph (2005), and indeed in much critical discourse analysis conducted in literacy research. However, it may be argued from a Foucauldian perspective that this distinction constitutes a strategy for normalizing “what counts” as “critical discourse analysis” among proponents of the approach, with consequences for what is “left out” in literacy research. Foucault’s concepts of genealogy, as well as post-structural feminism, bring to critical discourse analysis not only a cultural tool for a linguistic analysis of power in education settings, but also a historical lens for appreciating the ways in which gender and nation, culture and race have played out historically to produce contemporary literacy and educational discourses. In downplaying the contributions of Foucault and feminism to “Critical Discourse Analysis” or the “wider approaches” of critical discourse analysis, literacy researchers risk missing the significance of historical relationships between gender and power/knowledge as they are manifested in contemporary literacy practices.

Dorothy Smith (1999) pointed out that we live in a textually-mediated world. Whether we “take up” literacy advice or not, it nevertheless shapes our experiences of mothering, fathering, childhood and literacy. Yet this study is not an “accurate representation of reality.” The post-structural traditions that give rise to critical discourse analysis reject the project of a “neutral, objective science” (Rogers, et al., 2005, p. 382). This was a central tenet in this study, which opened and closed with my observations that, as a researcher and a mother, I am “part of the language practices I study” (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999). I lived both inside and outside the advice texts analyzed in this thesis, and as noted earlier in this study, this shaped my interpretations of literacy advice as a complex interplay of both oppression and promise. I engaged in this study because I wanted to better understand the stress I felt as the person responsible for my daughter’s literacy knowledge. But as the study unfolded, and my own experiences as a mother shifted and changed, I also became aware of the ways in which literacy advice not only regulated my literacy and mothering work, but at times also held up an image of promise and affirmation: If I can model these ideal literacy practices in my own life, my children will be successful, I will have done a good job. Indeed, what parent does not want their children to do well in school, to be happy and successful?