Parents’ Construction of Their Children as Gendered, Literate Subjects: a Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Semi-structured interviews with 56 middle-class Australian parents, both mothers and fathers, were analysed using critical discourse analysis.The effects of three discourses of childhood are traced through parents’ accounts of their children’s literacy development: the discourse of individualism, the discourse of childcentredness and the discourse of developmentalism.The study finds that alignments between these discourses and discourses of gender produce certain ideal kinds of gendered literate girls and gendered literate boys even when parents explicitly subscribe to the notion of gender equality or gender neutrality.The association of literacy with femininity or with particular personality types which are associated with femininity; the notion of girls being developmentally advanced in key literacy-related areas such as speech; the absence of a taboo on directing girls’ early learning; all of these elements have the potential to form a tight cluster constituting girls’ literacy learning as natural and unproblematic. In contrast, the opposition between masculinity and literacy, or particular literacies; the expectation of developmental delay and the attribution of agency to boys in deciding (or not deciding) when they are ready to learn; these elements form another tight cluster constituting boys’ literacy learning as problematic.