Another strategy to attend to the ways in which discourses are resisted or countered, was to include in the analysis texts outside of the mainstream of popular culture or commercial publishing. Writing by women in community writing programs, discussion groups on the Internet, and “moments in the practice of mothering discourses” that took place during the period of data collection, are included in the analysis because they often suggest the less visible but important ways that women resist and counter literacy advice discourses.
As suggested earlier, this step refers to analyzing the implications of discourses in terms of how power and knowledge are valued and circulated: What are the effects of literacy advice discourses for “what counts” as literacy and “good” mothering? Who benefits and who is excluded? Here, discourses are viewed as instruments of power, but also effects of power, capable of shifting and challenging relationships of power. This attention to discursive effects led me to consider the ways in which literacy advice discourses shape, and are shaped by, social and educational policy, literacy research, and the design of family literacy programs. These are considered in more detail in Chapter Seven.
As Phillips and Jorgenson (2002) put it, the study of discourse is “three
dimensional”
in the sense that it “connects texts to discourses,
locating them in a historical and social context, by which we refer to particular
actors, relationships and practices that characterize the situation under study”
(p. 70). Situating discourse analysis within a broader oeuvre, or terrain, is
a central component of a Foucauldian approach. Questions guiding such analysis
include the following: What are the power/knowledge networks of the period in
question? What were important or “trendy” concerns in social and
educational policy and in popular culture? How did this shape the content of
literacy advice texts? I provide a description of the context in which advice
texts and policy documents were produced in the opening of each chapter. As
I discuss in Chapter Eight, it is challenging to describe a context unless one
is actually living it, and even then, such a description can only be partial.
There are limitations in the information that is available, and that I selected
to include, and this shaped my description of the discursive context in a given
time and place. I attempted to mitigate this problem by drawing not only upon
primary sources to contextualize literacy advice discourses, but also to triangulate
these with scholarly secondary sources.