This article analyses the pedagogic discourse of family literacy, a type of education that works on the literacy development of both mothers and young children. It looks at the strand concerned with the adults' literacy and argues that the pedagogy aims to construct the participants as reflexive, but unquestioning, learners ready to accumulate qualifications; and as mothers whose time is constantly available for their children's cognitive development. The analysis traces the relationships between these desired identities and new capitalist ideology and discusses the contradictions inherent in this vision of motherhood.
This article addresses the question, How do changes in policy discourses shape public representations of literacy learners and the goals of adult literacy education? It examines specifically how the agency of adult literacy learners is constructed. We carry out a critical discourse analysis of two key adult literacy policy documents from the U.K.: the manifesto A Right to Read (British Association of Settlements, ) and Skills for Life: The National Strategy for Improving Adult Literacy and Numeracy Skills (Department for Education and Skills, ). We describe the overall structure and genre of the documents and analyze the semiotic resources in the texts to explore the discursive shaping of adult literacy learners. Our analysis shows that, while a functional discourse of individual deficit is prominent throughout the texts, each document expresses it differently. A discourse of rights and participation in the earlier text changes to a discourse of social inclusion, conditional on duty and responsibility and narrowed to the sphere of paid employment. The profiles of individual learners are heavily framed by the dominant discourses of literacy and education that constitute the texts. We argue that the discursive shifts we trace in these national documents relate to wider changes in notions of social disadvantage, rights and citizenship, and the emergence of literacy as a key indicator of progress. Our analysis demonstrates the powerful ways in which policy documents articulate relationships between national and transnational literacies.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.