Heart is the seat of all emotions and what "dampens the eye or broadens the smile. It is the minefield of our desires and the source of our motivation. Our confidence flows from its fountain. We lose hope when its waters run dry" (Malayalam, 2003).

Identity is a sense of self-constructedness in response to one's social environment. It involves a feeling of belonging to particular social groups, including but not limited to those based on one's gender, ethnicity, race, religion, and/or social class (Lips, 1993).

Voice is the ability to express freely one's ideas and opinions and is central to a feminist perspective. Sinner (2003) points out how the dichotomies of voice and silence hold positions of power and marginalization.

Plan of Presentation

This thesis is organized into five chapters; the central heart theme is used in the thesis title and in frequent quotations throughout. In this first chapter I have provided background information on the fields of literacy and family literacy in Canada and New Brunswick. I introduced the research problem and offered some insight about how I became interested in the topic of family literacy, its significance, some assumptions and presuppositions and definitions of terms used. I pointed out the difficulty in using the word literacy because of the lack of an agreed upon definition. I built an argument that literacy is not merely the skills of reading and writing traditionally promoted by schools, but rather there are multiple literacies which are linked to one's sense of self, values and forms of power. In Chapter 1, I also emphasized the importance of the researcher ensuring self-reflection.