This study emphasizes advice to Canadian mothers. However, due to the close linguistic, economic, and cultural ties Canada has had with the United States and Great Britain, the cross-border flow of texts, and the increasingly global nature of literacy advice and research in the 1980s and 1990s, “Canadian” advice is difficult to distinguish from advice from other Western, English speaking, industrialized countries. While for the most part the analysis relies upon commercially produced literacy advice, it also includes more obscure texts that were published outside the realm of formal public policy and published advice. As Foucault has argued, often these more obscure texts provide new or fresh insights into the origins and strategies of discourse (Mills, 2003).
I read and re-read literacy advice texts as I collected them, often searching out data that had inter-textual relationships to those already collected. I greatly under-estimated the time it would take, indeed the time that needs to be spent, to get to know data in a way that makes it possible to identify themes and begin an analysis. Finding regularity across statements necessarily required a deep familiarity with the patterns of those statements across diverse texts. This required an immersion in the textual world of literacy advice, to the extent that I found myself analyzing the discourse of everyday artifacts: community centre children’s programs, notices on a bulletin board for reading tutors, the notices my children brought home from school and daycare. In this way “knowing the data” became more than gaining familiarity with the general content of given texts; it was also a process of linking the data with my own life world, and wondering how much it was shaping my own mothering, and literacy, practices.
The process of identifying themes was embedded in the reading and re-reading of advice. Here the strategy of comparison proved useful. As more data were collected, it became easier to identify categories and “objects” of the discourse. These objects of discourse referred to how mothers and literacy were referred to in texts, how often they were referred to, and what concerns emerged in that context. In a pilot analysis of literacy advice to mothers published in the 1990s, I identified several themes. For example: