British Journal of Religious Education
ISSN: 0141-6200 (Print) 1740-7931 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbre20
Nurturing identity formation in adolescence
through narrative learning: a dialogue between
the pedagogies of media literacy and religious
education
Edward Wright
To cite this article: Edward Wright (2018): Nurturing identity formation in adolescence through
narrative learning: a dialogue between the pedagogies of media literacy and religious education,
British Journal of Religious Education, DOI: 10.1080/01416200.2018.1484696
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2018.1484696
Published online: 11 Jul 2018.
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BRITISH JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2018.1484696
Nurturing identity formation in adolescence through narrative
learning: a dialogue between the pedagogies of media literacy
and religious education
Edward Wright
Faculty of Media and Communication, Media School, Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, UK; Faculty of
Education, Faculty of Theology, University of Malta, Malta
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS
In these last four decades or so, adolescence became understood as the
time when young people ask fundamental questions about themselves,
each other, the world, and one’s past, present and future life that seek
unity of purpose and coherence. For most young people the digital
media are popular modalities through which they seek, consciously or
unconsciously, meaningful answers to such questions. Multimodal
spaces are sites for adolescent identity construction, a reality that
prompted media educators to focus more on youth as authors of multimodal productions that provide opportunities to create narratives of self.
RE has been increasingly justified by the support it provides students to
become subjects of life, and the potential to provide opportunities for
meaning-making. This essay explores how these functions of RE become
more possible through the creative pedagogy of MLE and the digital
technologies it utilizes for storytelling, especially photography and filmmaking which can engage the processes of interpretation and meaningmaking, imagination and critical reflection. The creativity of MLE can be
positively utilized in RE for meaning-making and identity formation. This
paper draws upon the Maltese context in which RE is more of a confessional nature (CRE). This model could significantly benefit from such an
endeavour.
MLE (Media Literacy
Education); C/RE (Catholic/
Religious Education);
adolescent identity
formation; narrative/
autobiographical learning
My father’s death. It was hard for me to cope. . .. at times it felt impossible to carry the pain and live with it 24/
7. Until that moment I used to think that religion. . .. I mean my (Catholic) faith. . .. mattered to me. But after that
tragic episode in my life I just refused to believe in God anymore. . ..and in the Church. . ..and in anything
related to faith and religion. All religious talk became nonsensical . . . and every religious symbol, ritual, place or
object filled me with so much anger.
This was a personal statement, expressed and shared by Tim (name changed for ethical
purposes), a 15 year-old student. Since in Malta religious education is of a confessional nature,
reflecting Article 2 of the Constitution (paragraphs 1–3) which states explicitly that the Catholic
religion is the official one on the island and should be taught in all schools, the context of this
statement was the Catholic Religious Education (CRE) class and it came as a reply to a question
that a colleague of mine in another school asked with the intention of stimulating the students’
thinking and reflection: ‘Can you please share with us a painful experience you went through
and how it impacted (made you think and feel about) your Catholic faith?’ Tim had established
a good relationship with the teacher and felt comfortable enough with him to visit his room
occasionally and talk about the life challenges he encountered. However, he was reserved and
CONTACT Edward Wright
© 2018 Christian Education
edward.wright@maltadiocese.org
2
E. WRIGHT
shy and certainly not one of the students who felt at ease to share personal experiences in a
group. In the first 2 years of secondary school, my colleague used to teach him Media Literacy
Education (MLE), which he loved and had such a passion for, especially for the hands-on
activities involving media production, like many of his peers. When Tim shared his difficult
moment with his favourite teacher, both of them had paused for a while, and the teacher
empathised with him, as he did with other students. Then, they continued with their discussion
on suffering and pain in the world, their impact on our faith and their possible outcome on how
we may start to perceive life and faith-related issues. That day passed but the teacher could
never forget that moment. However, at the end of the year, when the students were expected
to present their projects on any issue they had dealt with in the CRE class, Tim and two of his
classmates, Andy and Raphael (not their real names) had come forward with a short 5 min-film,
a mix of a short scripted drama and a documentary on their experiences of pain. The drama
took the form of a dialogue between them while they attended a school live-in, and included
flashbacks of Tim walking near a cemetery (where his father was buried), Andy sitting on a
bench in a public garden (where he had met his first girlfriend for the last time before they
split), and Raphael looking at a sports car (representing his friend’s death in a tragic accident a
couple of years before). The part of the voice-over documentary included several photos of the
people they dearly missed, but more significant was the fact that their script for the voice-over
was not information about the deceased, but their own reflections on what these ‘significant
others’ meant for them in the past, in the present, and how they inspired them for the future.
Moreover, they reflected about the many ‘atheistic moments’ of their faith journey, the way this
journey and their image of God were shaped by their life events, and how they envisaged these
would impact their future perspective on life and faith. The discussion that followed in class was
very effective and uniquely provoking in making students reflect critically upon fundamental
and existential questions of life in relation to their Catholic faith or lack of it. For the teacher,
those experiences were special moments that defined his professional identity and pedagogy,
both of MLE and CRE. He still cherishes the short film produced by Tim, Andy and Raphael, and
so many other multimodal productions produced by other students along the years of his
professional teaching career. Every now and again, I meet my teacher colleague and we share
several similar experiences we have experienced in our teaching career.
Such moments and experiences always make me think on how CRE could contribute to these
young people’s identity formation. Moreover, I reflect on how the development of the life story in
adolescence can make possible the combination of auto-biographical remembering and selfunderstanding to create a coherent account of one’s past, as well as to find purpose in life, both
present and future, through imagination and critical reflection. This essay will explore this combination in the light of an unusual but important and relevant dialogue between MLE and RE,
bringing out the potential of the former to enhance the students’ creative potential to narrate and
share their life stories in the RE class, especially through the art and skills of photography and filmmaking. It will be shown that in this way, RE would better achieve and fulfil one of its main aims,
namely that of facilitating identity formation by supporting students in the process of becoming
subjects of their own lives and finding purpose for it. What follows is a review of research literature
and studies, as well as my own personal reflections on my professional practice as a RE and MLE
teacher in Maltese Church schools in these last 20 years. Both of these together can create and
enlighten a possible dialogue between MLE and RE, which can have several implications for the
Maltese educational curriculum, especially in its challenge to offer students opportunities for
identity formation and meaning-making. However, for this dialogue to become possible, it is
necessary to first gain an understanding of the relationship between narrative and identity forma-
BRITISH JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
3
tion in adolescence, since narrative has been considered to be the key mechanism by which we
comprehend our life course development.
Relationship between narrative and identity formation
Since Erikson (1968) came up with his theory on psychosocial development, identity formation has
been viewed as one of the most significant tasks of adolescence that has implications for healthy
development throughout one’s life (Buckingham 2008). Over the last few decades, there has been a
reformulation of the basic concepts for identity development in terms of narrative (Habermas and
Bluck 2000). This has led to a renewed interest in the role of narrative in psychology (Baumeister
and Newman 1994; Habermas and Bluck 2000), particularly in the emergence and construction of
one’s life story that allows individuals to organise re-collective memories (Habermas and Bluck
2000) and knowledge of their past experiences in a coherent manner. Narrative has been considered to be the key mechanism by which we comprehend our life course development (Bamberg
2004; Rosenfeld Halverson 2010;). Through narratives, we understand ourselves, our experiences of
others and the world around us, including all the events that we live through. Consequently,
identity is made concrete through our life narratives, which eventually coalesce into a life story.
(McAdams 2006; McLean, Pasupathi, and Pals 2007; Rosenfeld Halverson 2010;). Narrative researchers also believe and assert that a reciprocal relationship exists between narratives of personal
experience and external presentations of identity (Rosenfeld Halverson 2010;).
Narrative meaning-making and identity formation in adolescence
Even though the importance of narrative for identity formation can be traced back to the early
years of childhood (Reese et al. 2010), it becomes particularly significant during preadolescence
and adolescence, the time when young people develop the capacity to think about the relationship between the past, present and future, and how their life narratives make sense across time
periods (Rosenfeld Halverson 2010). Several studies, such as those conducted by Bohn and
Berntsen (2008) and Habermas and De Silveira (2008), show that before preadolescence, most
9-year olds tended to start their life story after their birth and end it arbitrarily somewhere in their
past. These studies also show that coherence of the life narrative increased gradually and significantly between the ages of 9 and 12. It is during early adolescence, around the age of 12, that
the ability to create coherent life narratives starts to develop, a skill that is intimately related to and
much dependent upon the capacity for autobiographical reasoning, the ability to link together
single life events in a way that defines the young person’s identity and personality, creating a
meaningful story (Bohn and Berntsen 2008; Chen, McAnally, and Reese 2013; Habermas and De
Silveira 2008; Rosenfeld Halverson 2010; Steiner et al. 2014).
Habermas and Bluck (2000) speak of four different types of coherence that constitute autobiographical reasoning, and that could be observed in people of different cultures worldwide:
temporal, causal, cultural and thematic. The first refers to one’s ability to put events of the life
story in a chronological order. Causal coherence implies the ability to recount life experiences in
terms of causes and motivations, thus engaging in a process of meaning-making and interpretation
of certain life events that are particularly significant. Cultural coherence describes one’s ability to
assimilate shared cultural expectations and norms, and then include them in the life narrative to
make it more organised. Finally, thematic coherence occurs when one has the ability to establish
thematic similarities between various elements of life. Autobiographical reasoning, through such
abilities, becomes a constructive memory process that forges links between single life episodes,
makes connections between and provides interpretations of various life experiences. Such reasoning has been positively related to identity formation (Chen, McAnally, and Reese 2013; McLean and
Pasupathi 2012; Steiner and Pillemer 2016).
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E. WRIGHT
Since most young people today have such a strong attraction and passion for the digital world
and spend long hours every day roaming around the virtual reality of the Internet, which has
become for them a ‘natural habitat’, it is crucial for educators to understand how the multimodal
productions they produce and upload reveal aspects of their identity and some of the ways
through which they interpret significant life events, past and present as well as how they project
themselves into the future.
Identity and digital literacies in adolescents’ ‘participatory culture’
In recent years, an increasing awareness of youth participatory cultures (Jenkins et al. 2007) has
lead media educators and researchers to focus more on young people as ‘media producers’, ‘and
more specifically on multimodal production as a new form of literacy’ (Rosenfeld Halverson 2010,
2356). As Prensky (2001) had observed, the beginning of the 21st century was already experiencing
a generation of ‘digital natives’. Many of these young people, referred to as ‘prosumers’ by Martin
Lister (2003), are becoming fluent in the ‘new literacies’ by way of which they both create digital
products and upload them online, and consume popular images, combining, adapting and
incorporating them into their own media productions (Lankshear and Knobel 2003). Many of
these productions are used by adolescents and youth to tell stories about themselves, about
who they are and who they would like to be. They are often non-linear and multi-voiced, and
reflect several identity processes that are taking place in adolescence. Given that the processes of
producing, consuming, and ‘being shaped’ by these digital technologies occur simultaneously and
are intertwined, they become ideal entry points for the exploration of learning in relation to
identity formation, for it is precisely through such processes that that adolescent/youth identity
is constructed and deconstructed, experimented with, shaped and experienced (Buckingham 2008;
Lister 2003).
While there has been considerable research on the importance of identity and the processes
leading to its formation in digital production processes, research on the potential of film to
enhance identity formation processes in adolescence and youth has been sporadic (Rosenfeld
Halverson 2010). However, the latter shows that there is a direct and significant relationship
between the video/film production process and identity formation (Vargas 2006). Moreover, it
also demonstrates that film as a medium offers young people an effective way to produce
narratives of self (Hull and Katz 2006; Kress and Leeuwen 2006). It may indeed ‘represent the
ideal medium for accessing an unmediated relationship with the real’. While digital technologies
can have a considerably strong impact on identity through the process of merging words, rhyme,
rhythm, imagery and music, as well as movement, film becomes a more dynamic and effective
medium for representing self (Kress and Leeuwen 2006; Rosenfeld Halverson 2010). It is through
these propensities that film becomes a core tool for meaning-making.
MLE as curricular space for promoting creativity, imagination and critical thinking in
relation to identity formation
Bragg talks about the importance of letting adolescent students bring their existing and diverse
pleasures and areas of digital expertise in the classroom, while at the same time stimulating them
to reflect critically on what they produce. In this sense Medial Literacy Education (MLE) becomes an
important ‘transactional learning space’ between school-based education and leisure activities
among youth (Erstad, Gilje, and Lange 2007). This leads students to view learning as enjoyment
(see also McDougall 2007; Martens 2010). Yet it is when students are given the opportunity to
discuss media critically and opportunities for sharing and discussing media texts produced by
students themselves that learning occurs most (Redmond 2012). This sense of critical enjoyment
goes far beyond the inoculation, preparation and appreciation approaches. It embraces the
BRITISH JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
5
students’ experiences of analysing, evaluating and sharing the media they produce, while facilitating learning through the nurturing of a critical mind in the concrete context of life experiences. At
the same time, such an approach embraces the students’ feelings during learning.
Buckingham (2003) argues for the inevitability of creative production in MLE. Through its social
and collaborative dimensions, students could engage in a process of negotiating friendships and
defining identities while constructing their own story productions in media education projects
(Buckingham and Sefton-Green 1994). Through creative production, especially in the forms of
photography and film-making, students could also explore how the self is constructed and
represented (Buckingham 2003). Buckingham and Sefton-Green (1994) state that MLE can serve
as an ideal space for students to ‘consciously manipulate and play with various identities through
self-portraits and photo-stories using a range of familiar media genre’ (in Buckingham 2003, 129).
The degree of play, fantasy and wish fulfilment that the project allows provides the space to
students to exploration in an effective manner several social issues related to their identity
(Buckingham 2003). Buckingham (2003) also explains how digital technologies can facilitate the
production process in photography or film-making by making it possible to learn through trial and
error, looking back at earlier versions of one’s work, and reflect upon how and why some ideas
might have changed. Such digital technologies make drafting and redrafting possible, allowing for
critical self-evaluation in the process. Even in post-production, the decisions that need to be made
with regard to the selection, manipulation and combination of images and sounds are not only
facilitated and made more accessible through digital technologies, but involve a whole process of
meaning-making that is intimately related to identity formation.
Moreover, Renee Hobbs (2011) believes that the creative and expressive dimension of MLE is
not only inevitable and crucial for the relevance of the subject, but it also enables students to apply
their creative and expressive skills in other learning areas, such as the arts and sciences, enhancing
their appreciation, understanding, and mastery of these subjects. However, this could only be
possible if digital technology does not become an end in itself but a means towards important
ends or outcomes, such as collaborative production and sharing with a wider audience
(Buckingham 2008). Thus the link between learning and the life story (as the construction of
experiences) becomes central to education, and the synergy between narrative and experiential
learning, particularly in the areas of constructivism, situated learning and a critical cultural perspective on learning, is strengthened (Clark and Rossiter 2008; Clark 2010).
The contribution of MLE to RE and identity formation
Since through the skills they learn and practice in MLE students bring out more and further
improve their creative potential, while being afforded the space to express their identities in
different ways, RE can certainly be one of the curricular subjects that benefits from the pedagogy
of MLE, if both subjects are present in the curriculum and thus, taught in all Maltese schools.
Six years ago, I decided to experiment with a new kind of task that I gave to my students of the
CRE class. They had to prepare a short presentation, using any media/digital technologies they
want, to share with the group 10 different ‘things’ that they thought shaped their religious
worldview and beliefs. I specified that these 10 ‘things’ could be anything: objects, people, physical
spaces, dialogic encounters, etc that are related to specific experiences which created strong
associations in memory. The students had a month to work on this task, and then come to class
to share it with classmates. They also had a choice: either to explain the significance of each ‘thing’
in the multimodal presentation, or to just show their 10 things through it, and then elaborate upon
their significance in class. Both options were taken by different students. For 3 whole months, in
every CRE lesson, a student or two started off the lesson with their presentations. It was my duty
then to relate what was presented, explained and reflected upon in those presentations with the
subject and learning outcomes of the lesson. Colleagues told me that was too risky and ambitious
to do as I could never know what my students could come up with. Moreover, I would not have
6
E. WRIGHT
had time to think how to link my learning outcomes for the lesson with what my student/s decided
to share. My answer to them was always the same, and made up of two parts: without risk we
could never develop our pedagogies and make learning more effective and student centred, and
after all, why should such an experiment be risky at all? Our students’ life stories experiences could
always be related to any subject or topic that is discussed and dealt with in the CRE class. When I
look back at and reflect upon my professional classroom practice in these last 6 years of my 20-year
teaching career, I observe with satisfaction that there is a realistic possibility, if educators are careful
on how to approach it, of engaging in digital media production in ways that open up elements of
personal identity formation, including religious identity in the broad sense as explained in the
previous section, and with particular resonance to our young people’s social and cultural context as
well as their contemporary environments. Since digital storytelling, especially through the use of
photos and film-making, begins in learning how to share stories that frequently have a personal
foundation to them, the process is immediately congruent with the kind of religious education that
seeks the formation of personal and religious identity, and develops spirituality.
Grimmitt (1987) believes that identity formation mainly consists of how a human being creates
personal meaning in a social reality or context. He argues in favour of a religious education that can
help adolescents and young people find their role as subjects of life, thus facilitating a fundamental
milestone of their identity formation. This, he says, can be achieved when religious educators help
students explore the purposes and meanings through which they constitute and interpret their
own life experiences, facilitate spaces for them to construct their life story through narratives by
way of which they acquire integrated wholeness and a coherent view of themselves, create
opportunities for social interaction to explore the moral and civic virtues for themselves and
society, and when they support them to think and act critically, independently, and responsibly
towards others (Grimmitt 1987; Niemi 2006, 35–39). Thus, in the process of becoming subjects of
life, religious education can enable young people to become critical, even of their own past
experiences and decisions, make them more integrated and coherent, empower them to meet
life’s challenges, and afford them the opportunity to project their lives in the future as they wish
them to be and reflect upon such projections through imagination. Religious Education can
achieve such aims through a narrative pedagogical approach that concretises a sense of continuity
between past, present and future. In this way, it can act as a binding force, dealing with internal
fragmentation and bringing wholeness, making adolescents and young people stronger to work
and act after a process of reflection (Grimmitt 1987; Niemi 2006). By adopting such a framework
and mind-set in relation to religious education, the subject could address young people’s search for
meaning and spirituality that are so vital for their identity formation (Crawford and Rossiter 2006). If
religious education manages to accomplish such an aim, then it would become a really and truly
instrumental agent in society that contributes to solutions for the ‘problem of identity’ that has
become the ‘loudest talk in town’ (Bauman 2004, 17). This occurs when the educational system and
people responsible to design curricula conceptualise identity formation as ‘a process in which
individuals draw on both internal and cultural resources for their self-understanding and selfexpression’. These, in turn, could be ‘worked out through complex interactions between their
identity needs and the identity resources they find in culture’ (De Souza 2011, 2–3).
Such a narrative pedagogical approach can also be enlightened by a narrative-hermeneutic
perspective to autobiographical learning such as that proposed by Ricoeur. He believes that when
people narrate their own lives, and they are the main character of that story, they construct their
own identity in connection with the plot of their autobiographical narrative (Ricoeur 1992, 141,
147), a plot that is simultaneously determined by the most important experiences of our lives that
we narrate as stories, and by the way we interpret them in a new narrative configuration (Miedema
and Roebben 2008). Ricoeur uses the term ‘emplotment’ to explain how identity develops in
meaningful ways through the dynamic process of story telling, which acts on existing material,
modifying and expanding it to create more narratives that include a certain extent of novelty. For
stories to have a real impact on one’s present, they must correspond to what a person already
BRITISH JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
7
knows and understands through previously internalised stories. The unique power of stories,
according to Ricoeur (1984) lies in their ‘double allegiance’ to both intelligibility and innovation,
the strange and the familiar, life ‘as’ and life ‘as if’. Thus, when persons recount and retell their past,
they are not simply remembering and reciting life histories and chronologies of past events, but
they are reflecting deeply on the significance of life occurrences, through the discernment of a
dynamic plot, which has the potential of being interpreted in a multitude of ways, and which can
invoke known themes, values, characters, etc. In this way, reflection on life stories and experiences
helps us connect past events with the present, and at the same time provides better selfunderstanding by way of which we can imagine alternative and possible personal narratives
unfolding in the future. The lived present, thus, becomes a way to rediscover our capacity to
imagine constructively our life as other than it is. Ricoeur believes that narrative and autobiographical learning occur at three different levels: when we hear stories such as myths, moral tales,
religious parables and personal experiences, when we tell the stories ourselves and thus become
the actor, putting all the details together and making the experience coherent for ourselves and
others, and thirdly when we recognise the narratives in which we are positioned. At all these levels
of narrative learning, meaning is simultaneously related to past experience, re-constructed within
the present, and more often than not oriented towards the future. This view of narrative identity
facilitates the understanding of religious narrative identity that is so crucially important for the
pedagogy of RE teachers. If religion is a matter of ultimate concern (Tillich 1978, I, 14), as it is
concerned with the wholeness and uniqueness of human existence, then it is intimately related to
the meaning and aim of human existence. Religious identity starts to develop with the individual’s
interpretation of his or her life story from a transcendent perspective. Establishing coherence to
one’s life story has been shown to be directly related to the formation of religious identity
(Miedema and Roebben 2008; Ricoeur 1992). Thus, the formation of one’s personal and religious
identity occurs as a hermeneutic process in the light of the prevailing narratives present in the
surrounding culture. When these narratives are internalized, the individual enters the life histories
and narrative traditions of others (Ricoeur 1992, 154–156).
More recently, a growing number of religious educationalists have stated and written extensively on the formation of identity, including religious identity, as one of the main aims of religious
education in today’s multi-cultural and pluralistic society (Bertram-Troost, de Roos, and Miedema
2006; Miedema 2009; Roebben 2009a, 2009b; Schweitzer 2012; Ter Avest 2012). Roebben (2009b)
insists that young people need to be listened to carefully and urgently, and teachers need to
empathise with their life experiences, making these the starting point or the spring board to the
appreciation of a particular religious identity, such as a Christian identity. This is built on the view
that students are ‘human beings with their own existential longing, with their own soul’ (ibid. 163),
and that they ‘have the right and the ability to share with each other and to theologize about their
personal and communal lives’ (ibid. 181–2). Certainly, it would be worthwhile exploring how this
view of RE can be put into practice through a pedagogy that engages students to reflect upon and
represent their lives in creative ways, and therefore, how through the skills they learn and the
creativity they gain in MLE, they can mature in their identity holistically.
Some religious educators I have met in my career and many of whom are still colleagues of
mine do agree with such a view of religious education, at least partially, but are at the same time
afraid that it may be too humanistically oriented, thus risking greatly that CRE loses its distinctive
feature of contributing to the Catholic identity, both on a personal and on a communal level. They
feel that it can pose quite a challenge for them, and that they may lack the skills to help young
learners weave their own stories into the larger story of the Catholic faith community through time.
Moreover, they feel that in a community of faith such as the Roman Catholic Church, there is a
delicate balance that needs to be found between empowering individual students to articulate and
reflect upon their own stories and the feelings attached to them, and at the same time generating
recognition of and investment in communal authority, especially in the teaching of religious
dogmatic content that makes up a substantial part the CRE syllabi. Such a delicate balance
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E. WRIGHT
represents a great challenge for many CRE teachers in Malta, a challenge that needs to be urgently
addressed. The narrative approach to the subject through the use of photography and film-making
proposed in this paper could help address such a challenge by relating more the dogmatic content
of the Catholic faith to one’s life experiences. This becomes possible because the latter’s interpretation is enlightened by the former through the creativity of digital technologies that represent
the world of today’s young generations. Furthermore, the students’ assessment tasks for the
various modules that comprise the syllabi of CRE could be designed in a way that allows them
to use their creativity through the use of digital technologies. Even the assessment tasks of MLE
could be related to identity issues that are important and significant to students and that can help
them reflect upon transcendental aspects that are integral to those issues. These are ideas that I
have at times tried out in my CRE classrooms, with very positive results. Further still, I have shared
such ideas with both MLE and CRE teachers, and even delivered short courses to religion teachers
in which they were taught the basic skills, attitudes, competences and knowledge related to MLE.
The outcome was very encouraging as a significant number of CRE teachers felt empowered
enough to experiment with this approach.
The application of digital technologies to CRE
In learning how to construct a life story from one’s own personally significant experiences,
adolescent students in the CRE classroom can be brought into a more critically engaged relationship with such a story, with those of other students, as well as with the most significant traditions
and narratives of the faith community or religious tradition they belong to, as is the case in Malta.
Much of the research until now focusing on storytelling in religious education occurred in nondigital settings and viewed religious education in a broad sense, not tied to a particular religious
tradition (Conde-Frazier 2007; Miedema and Roebben 2008; Selçuk 2008). However, unfortunately,
only a few sporadic studies have been conducted on how digital technologies, especially photography and film-making, can be applied to a specific model of RE, such as the confessional model
that is tied to a particular faith tradition, such as the Catholic religious tradition, as is the case in
Malta. These studies were based on a few projects investigating digital storytelling in the context of
either a broadly viewed religious education such as multicultural religious education, or a Christian
religious education viewed and constructed from the perspective of Christian churches with much
less hierarchical structures than the Roman Catholic Church, and with much less emphasis on
religious identity based on dogma and Tradition as presented by the teaching magisterium of the
church, and the popular values, beliefs and devotions that have always been held by the faithful
(the ‘sensus fidelium’).
Thus, if the formation of a narrative identity occurs as a crucially important hermeneutic
process throughout one’s life, and the same could be said of one’s religious narrative identity,
research projects and studies need to be conducted with the aim of understanding how digital
technologies, especially photography and film-making can facilitate identity formation through
RE. Malta must not be an exception to such an endeavour, and a pilot study is already being
planned in this respect for the next scholastic year and beyond. It is hoped that such a study, if
successful, would shed light on how RE in Malta can gain more relevance by unlocking its
potential to assist adolescents in the development of their religious identity, through a
dialogical, hermeneutic process in which they integrate religious narratives into their own
autobiographies by exploring the significance of religious texts and narratives and personal
religious accounts in the present context. After all, as has already been pointed out, Ricoeur
(1991) believes that a narrative’s significance ‘stems from the intersection of the world of the
text and the world of the reader’. Such potential could be actualised through photography and
film-making, digital technologies that could concretise a narrative-developmental approach to
CRE. Thus, it would also finally put into practice the aims of and ideals for CRE that the Maltese
BRITISH JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
9
‘National Curriculum Framework’ (2012, 35) emphasises the importance of when it states that
the teaching of CRE in schools should be
seen as an important element in the integral formation of the person. It should lead to a process of selfdiscovery, developing the moral and spiritual dimensions and contributing towards children’s capacity to
value, appreciate, perceive and interpret the world they live in. . .. . ..Learning in this area nurtures and enhances
a sense of spiritual self. Children and young people develop their own identity and understand better their
cultural identity.
Paving the way forward
This endeavour can be very realistically achieved on our small and beautiful Mediterranean island
if, as the NCF also specifies with regard to ‘Digital Literacy’ (2012, 37),
it promotes learning that is facilitated through using the potential of technologies to enable students to show
and create knowledge, and through an increased complexity of tasks and use of multi-modal information for
identity formation in every aspect of it.
Thus, through the pedagogy of MLE that promotes reflection and creativity, CRE can concretise
a narrative-developmental approach to the life story of adolescents, contributing significantly to
their identity formation. To achieve this aim it is important to conduct research, both quantitative
and qualitative but especially the latter, to analyse the effectiveness of this approach after it is
applied to CRE and MLE. Ways need to be found as to how the students’ assessment tasks can be
designed in ways that facilitate the exploration of identity issues that are integral to the transcendental dimension of adolescent development. These ways must also relate the various doctrinal
tenets of the Catholic faith that comprise the syllabi of CRE to one’s life experiences. Such
pedagogical initiatives must be continuously assessed and reflected upon, and teachers given
the opportunity to come together in a community of learning to share and discuss their observations regarding the effectiveness of such initiatives. In this way this narrative-developmental
approach to learning will not only be effectively embedded in CRE and MLE and other related
subjects (humanities), but will redefine their pedagogies, as to make them more conducive and
sensitive to the transcendental realm of every human being that transpires from his creation in
God’s own image and likeness.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Edward Wright is reading for a doctorate at Bournemouth University. He is researching how the pedagogies of Media
Literacy Education and Religious Education could contribute to meaning-making and identity formation in adolescence, especially through the application of digital media, especially photography and film-making (moving image).
Mr Wright has been teaching Media Literacy Education, Social Studies, Personal, Social and Career Development and
Religious Education for the last 20 years, in a Maltese secondary Church school. For these last 7 years, he has also
been fulfilling the role of Head of Department for MLE and PSCD as well as lecturing on the teacher formation courses
at the University of Malta. He is also the main author of a research paper titled Media Education as a tool to promote
critical thinking among students (2015) that was published in the peer-reviewed journal Media Education. In
February 2018, he also participated in and contributed to the first International Conference of Catholic Religious
Education (ICCRE) that was organised in Malta. The title of his paper and presentation was Using Digital Technologies
to Interpret Life Experiences through a Catholic Perspective: Media Literacy and Catholic Religious Education in Dialogue.
10
E. WRIGHT
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