In carrying out this study, I followed the “Guide to doing Foucauldian
genealogical discourse analysis”
provided by Carabine (2001). I describe
below the steps in this analysis and the ways in which they were adapted and
carried out in the present study. As Carabine points out, a genealogical investigation
is not a linear process. The processes of collecting, analysing, and interpreting
data were bound tightly together in spurts of insight and months of ruminating
over ideas. While I tried to select texts that were, or are, widely distributed
it was often the obscure advice texts that signaled an important theme to explore,
and thus a new path of inquiry. As was mentioned earlier, mothering two young
children while writing this thesis informed the analysis in many ways. As the
writer of this study who is “also a construct of discourse”
(Griffith & Smith, 2005, p. 15), I had access to literacy advice of all
kinds, solicited and otherwise, as my son was born and my daughter entered Kindergarten.
I describe briefly below, and in more detail in the discussion of the study
in Chapter Eight, the ways in which these subjectivities shaped my analysis.
As stated in the opening paragraph to this study in Chapter One, my topic arose from my lived experience as a mother, surprising myself as I acted upon literacy advice I had barely been conscious of reading or hearing. This event shaped the topic and the data sources that would inform it. While this thesis is primarily concerned with discourses that construct mothers as literacy teachers, the scope of the advice texts selected, and the themes under study within the texts, necessarily included those that contributed to the construction of the “mother-as-teacher” in broader terms. The reason for this broader focus is both pragmatic and strategic. To reiterate, the vast majority of advice texts that refer to literacy are actually concerned primarily with children’s reading, and as the thesis argues, supporting children’s reading has become increasingly embedded in general child-raising practices associated with ideal mothering. For this reason, child-raising topics such as language development, women’s organization of children’s (and domestic) time and space for learning, and preparing for and supporting schooling were included in the analysis as texts that related to literacy. Indeed, it is a finding of this thesis that advice to mothers about literacy is rarely only about their children’s reading and writing development. This advice is fundamentally about the regulation of mothering, and the normalization of the unreachable ideal of the “good mother.”