Understanding critical literacy through Lacan's four orders of discourse model

Abstract

Although conceived as a model for psycho-analytical discourse, Lacan's four orders of discourse model may offer a beginning tool to conceptualize the implementation of critical literacy discourses in classrooms as a process of shifting students' relationships with the symbolic order. Most subjects, Lacan argues, are unaware that their ideas and selves are being shaped by their relationship with the symbolic order, and without that awareness there is little that they can do to change that relationship. The process whereby the participants' relationship to the symbolic order is made conscious, and can therefore be disrupted, falls to critical literacy teachers. Although critical literacy teachers have many of the same goals and beliefs, their enactment of critical literacy is quite different based on which community of practice they see as the goal of student learning. This paper explores the differential enactment of critical literacy in three classrooms and uses Lacan's four orders of discourse as a theoretical frame. Two main constructions of critical literacy will be explored. The first focuses on the creation of curricula based on student comments and understandings while overtly teaching resistant reading skills – referred to as resistant reading critical literacy. This construction asks students to make small shifts in their classroom subjectivities or micro-transformations. The second form of critical literacy works to apprentice students into the community of social activism. In this case, students are asked to shift their ways of thinking through the teacher presentation of critical chains of signification.

Keywords:

• critical literacy
• psychoanalysis
• social activism
• community of practice