Making connections, pre-reading reader response and mother-research from one family's perspective

grantor: University of TorontoThis is a study of two lived aspects of family life. Using a phenomenological, narrative approach, the dissertation offers as its main focus a mimetic word tapestry of daily experience in the lives of two pre-reading children and their emerging mother-researcher in a family life that is abundant in orally shared reading. The first specific aspect is the verbal connections made by the two children to shared oral reading in their home. Locating these connections within the realm of pre-reading reader response, the author's main concentration is on the responses which occur long after the reading sessions are over and which are initiated and developed by the children themselves. The second aspect deals with the author's growing responses to these connections. Locating her responses within the realm of mother-research, the author offers the mimetic tapestry, and accompanying reflections, as a look at her lived experience as mother, graduate student and mother-researcher. Collected during the three-year span of the author's life as a graduate student, the data in this study stems from four main sources: videotaped early reading sessions; audiotaped spontaneous conversations and the according transcripts; family history (scrapbooks, calendars); the author's journal, consisting of records of the children's verbal connections and reflections about them, as well as pertinent graduate papers and portfolios. Using phenomenological analysis, the data is then woven into a mimetic word tapestry in an attempt to provide the reader with a sense of daily lived experience. Central to this study are several of the author's philosophies. The importance of daily, lived experience and the routines of life with small children, through the study of which much knowledge can be gained about such a life, is one philosophy. Furthermore, that the richness and vitality of stories, whether from books or children or their parents, informs our lives and the way we accordingly see the world around us, is another philosophy. Also central is the notion that, as readers, we bring the texts which we read to life and that, in doing so, they reciprocally offer us a heightened awareness and further knowledge. Lastly, the role of graduate work, and the writing of a dissertation, are also seen as ways in which we can simultaneously look outward at the world around us and inward at our own workings and, in the process, come to see both in enlightened, or possibly changed, ways.Ed.D