Resistance and engagement in the critical classroom: a psychoanalytic reading of critical pedagogy

This research takes up psychoanalysis as an analytical lens to examine participants' literacy narratives, particularly how critical discourses are engaged and resisted, in order to generate multiple and competing definitions of what it means to be critical in the composition classroom. Using autoethnography as research method, participants narrated their literacy histories by anchoring personal stories in the broader cultural and social contexts of their lives. The researcher lays out competing definitions of criticality as refracted through each participant's narrative arc, ultimately suggesting how teachers of composition might use autoethnography as a way of doing critical work.