The findings of this study suggest that in producing family literacy research
that translates into mothering advice, literacy researchers are engaged in gendered
practices of power. Literacy research, and the advice and program interventions
that often inform such research, are shaped not only by a broad reading of all
available research findings, but by a “strategic reading”
(Dressman,
1999, p. 34) of findings that are deemed educationally relevant, politically
palatable, and perhaps easier to implement. The views of Dressman, in relation
to the trend toward “evidence-based research”
in the United States
that seeks to exclude critical or socio-cultural perspective of literacy, also
suggest that literacy advice to mothers may similarly be about much more than
teaching children to read. Dressman observed:
In the 1990’s, what appears to be indisputably objective scientific knowledge about early literacy to some appears to others to be a set of discrete facts that have been broadly interpreted to produce policies and literacy curricula that are as much the product of their makers’ cultural politics and normative assumptions about social reality as they are the product of dispassionate use of scientific method. (Dressman, 1999, p. 1)
This echoed New’s (2002) perspective on the socially constructed nature
of early literacy research and practice. She stated, “educational responses
to and expectations of young children reflect deeply held beliefs, including
assumptions about what is normative, necessary and developmentally appropriate”
(p. 247). It is thus instructive to read theories and policies of emergent and
family literacy with a view to the social, cultural and political contexts that
shape them. Indeed, literacy research and literacy advice has been largely blind
to the gender implications of its work, a point made by Patterson (1995) in
her critique of reading research from 1989–1994. She found that research
assumed that “gender does not play a role in the production of reading
practices but is simply a biological fact to be noted within a particular research
design”
(p. 295). This failure to account for gender as a unit of analysis
may be seen as a discursive strategy that naturalizes mothers as the managers
of domestic literacy. Yet if researchers do not consider how mothering discourses
may shape their research designs and interpretations, key questions facing educators
and families, such as the relationships between literacy and equity, between
school and home literacy practices, and between families and institutions cannot
be meaningfully understood or addressed.