I adopt in this research a critical approach to discourse analysis. This implies that I bring to the study a prior theory about my data. I believe that I will find in literacy advice texts insights into the “(re)production and challenge of dominance” (van Dijk, 2001, p. 300) in the gendered ideals of the “mother-as-teacher-of literacy.” This a priori perspective is illustrated in the scenario with my daughter that became a catalyst for this research: Where does this literacy advice come from? What insights into the regulation of mothering can a critical analysis of literacy advice provide? The approaches to critical discourse analysis adopted in this study are associated with Foucault’s genealogical method and his concern with the ways in which power and knowledge come together in discourse. For Foucault, discourse analysis involved identifying discursive formations and the strategies by which statements identified with these formations become true and are circulated or excluded and rendered invisible or silenced. These discourses, as others have noted, “govern what can be said, thought and done within a field” (Luke, 2001 p. 2) as well as how texts “form the subjects of which they speak” (Foucault, 1977, p. 49). Understanding how certain statements become “true” involves attention to the history of power relationships. The genealogical method as used by Foucault thus attends to where ideas or statements come from. This is elaborated in Chapter Two.

A Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis coincides with an understanding of literacy as socially-situated practice. This perspective, and its implications for the study of both literacy and mothering in this thesis, is described below.