Motherhood as experience and motherhood as institution are not mutually exclusive; each shapes and reinforces the other in the context of daily life. This distinction attends to the ways in which discourses are constituted, as well as constitute, social relations, and offers a useful heuristic device to scholars of advice to mothers such as Arnup (1996) to “examine and perhaps criticize particular aspects of the institution of motherhood without devaluing the joy that the experience of motherhood brings to many women” (Arnup, 1996, p. 5).

Mothering and literacy as socially-situated practices

The concept of situated practices, briefly introduced in the introductory chapter, offers another response to the risk of privileging institutional representations of motherhood in discourse analysis. As described earlier, the view of literacy as socially situated practice draws on the understanding of this concept as put forward by Barton, Hamilton and Ivanik (2000). They argued:

Practices are shaped by social rules which regulate the use and distribution of texts, prescribing who may produce and have access to them. They straddle the distinction between the social and individual worlds, and literacy practices are more usefully understood as existing in the relations between people, within groups, and communities, rather than as a set of properties residing in individuals (p. 8)

It is from this attention to interplay between institutional and local uses of literacy that the concept of habitus comes into play as shaping the social rules surrounding whose literacy practices are considered more valuable. Habitus, a “way of being” that encompasses people’s belief systems and ways of thinking about the world, is also expressed in the ways people use literacy in their everyday lives. Discourses may indeed shape the forms of habitus that are privileged, yet habitus can also be a force of resistance against dominant discourses and indeed a lens for highlighting the local “everyday-ness” of literacy and indeed, of mothering. This is particularly true if a definition of habitus includes Stuart Wells’ (1997) notion that habitus can be shaped and formed (or transformed) in the context of social relationships. The following description by Farrell, Luke, Shore and Waring (1995), illustrated the perspective of literacy as socially-situated practice, and alluded to habitus in their reference to issues of identity, power, and access. One may substitute references to mothering for references to literacy to achieve a similar understanding of mothering as a set of socially-situated practices:

Literacies, and literacy education, are by definition always local and always particular, always working in concert with issues of identity, power and access in particular institutions, communities and culture.…It is in these local sites that particular literacy practices come to ‘count’ and ‘matter’, taking on value and power in local fields of exchange. (Farrell, Luke, Shore & Waring, 1995, p. 1)