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. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 5 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cbre20 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). 4 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 8 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 References Bamberg, M. 2004. “Narrative Discourse and Identities.” In Narratology beyond Literary Criticism, edited by J. C. Meister, T. Kindt, W. Schernus, and M. Stein, 213–237. New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter. Bauman, Z. 2004. Identity. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Baumeister, R. F., and L. S. Newman. 1994. “How Stories Make Sense of Personal Experiences: Motives that Shape Autobiographical Narratives.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 20: 67–90. doi:10.1177/0146167294206006. Bertram-Troost, G. D., S. A. de Roos, and S. Miedema. 2006. “Religious Identity Development of Adolescents in Religiously Affiliated Schools: A Theoretical Foundation for Empirical Research.” Journal of Beliefs and Values 27 (3): 303–314. doi:10.1080/13617670601001165. Bohn, A., and D. Berntsen. 2008. “Life Story Development in Childhood: The Development of Life Story Abilities and the Acquisition of Cultural Life Scripts from Late Middle Childhood to Adolescence.” Developmental Psychology 44: 1135–1147. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.44.4.1135. Buckingham, D. 2003. Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buckingham, D., ed. 2008. Youth, Identity and Digital Media. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Buckingham, D., and J. Sefton-Green. 1994. Cultural Studies Goes to School: Reading and Teaching Popular Media. London: Taylor and Francis. Chen, Y., H. M. McAnally, and E. Reese. 2013. “Development in the Organization of Episodic Memories in Middle Childhood and Adolescence.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 7: 1–9. doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00001. Clark, C., and M. Rossiter. 2008. “Narrative Learning in Adulthood.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 119: 61–70. doi:10.1002/ace.306. Clark, M. C. 2010. “Narrative Learning: Its Contours and Its Possibilities.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 126: 3–11. doi:10.1002/ace.367. Conde-Frazier, E. 2007. “Culture and the Production of Religious Knowledge and Interpretation.” Religious Education 102 (2): 11–115. doi:10.1080/00344080701285196. Crawford, M., and G. Rossiter. 2006. Reasons for Living: School Education and Young People’s Search for Meaning, Identity, and Spirituality. Melbourne, VIC: Australian Council for Educational Research. De Souza, M. 2011. “Promoting Inter-Spiritual Education in the Classroom: Exploring the Perennial Philosophy as a Useful Strategy to Encourage Freedom of Religious Practice and Belief.” Journal of Religious Education 59 (1): 27–37. Erikson, E. 1968. Identity, Youth and Crisis. New York, NY: Norton. Erstad, O., Ø. Gilje, and D. Lange. 2007. “Remixing Multimodal Resources: Multiliteracies and Digital Production in Norwegian Media Education.” Learning, Media and Technology 32 (2): 183–198. doi:10.1080/17439880701343394. Grimmitt, M. 1987. Religious Education and Human Development: The Relationship between Studying Religions and Personal, Social and Moral Education. Great Wakering Essex: McCrimmon. Habermas, T., and S. Bluck. 2000. “Getting a Life: The Emergence of the Life Story in Adolescence.” Psychological Bulletin 126: 748–769. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.126.5.748. Habermas, T., and C. De Silveira. 2008. “The Development of Global Coherence in Life Narratives across Adolescence: Temporal, Causal, and Thematic Aspects.” Developmental Psychology 44: 707–721. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.44.3.707. Halverson, E. R.. 2010. “Film as Identity Exploration: A Multimodal Analysis of Youth-Produced Films.” Teachers College Record 112 (9): 2356. Hobbs, R. 2011. Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Classroom and Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Hull, G. A., and M. Katz. 2006. “Crafting an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Storytelling.” Research in the Teaching of English 41 (1): 43–81. Jenkins, H., R. Purushotma, K. Clinton, M. Weigel, and A. J. Robison. 2007. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Kress, G., and V. Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge. Lankshear, C., and M. Knobel. 2003. New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press. Lister, R. 2003. Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Martens, H. 2010. “Evaluating Media Literacy Education: Concepts, Theories and Future Directions.” Journal of Media Literacy Education 2 (1): 1–22. McAdams, D. P. 2006. The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. McDougall, J. 2007. “What Do We Learn in Smethwick Village? Computer Games, Media Learning and Discursive Confusion.” Learning, Media and Technology 32 (2): 121–133. doi:10.1080/17439880701343071. McLean, K. C., and M. Pasupathi. 2012. “Processes of Identity Development: Where I Am and How I Got There.” Identity: an International Journal of Theory and Research 12: 8–28. doi:10.1080/15283488.2011.632363. McLean, K. C., M. Pasupathi, and J. L. Pals. 2007. “Selves Creating Stories Creating Selves: A Process Model of Narrative Self-Development.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 11: 262–278. doi:10.1177/1088868307301034. Miedema, S. 2009. “Religious Education between Certainty and Uncertainty. Towards a Pedagogy of Diversity.” In Religious Education in a World of Religious Diversity, edited by W. A. J. Meijer, S. Miedema, and A. M. Lanser-van der Velde, 195–205. New York/Berlin: Waxmann. BRITISH JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 11 Miedema, S., and B. Roebben. 2008. “The Two Contested Concepts of Culture and Tradition in Religious Education.” Religious Education 103 (4): 480–492. doi:10.1080/00344080802250800. A National Curriculum for All. Published by the Ministry of Education and Employment, Malta. 2012 December. Act No. XXIV of 1988. An Act Enacted by the Parliament of Malta. An Act to Consolidate and Reform the Law Relating to Education in Malta. Valletta: Department of Information. 1988. Art. 2. Niemi, H. 2006. “‘Identity Formation and Religious Education – Meeting the Challenge for a Meaningful Life’.” In Religion, Spirituality and Identity, edited by K. Tirri. Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern. Prensky, M. 2001. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” On the Horizon 9 (5): 1–6. Redmond, T. 2012. “The Pedagogy of Critical Enjoyment: Teaching and Reaching the Hearts and Minds of Adolescent Learners through Media Literacy Education.” Journal of Media Literacy Education 4 (2): 106–120. Reese, E., C. Yan, F. Jack, and H. Hayne. 2010. “Emerging Identities: Narrative and Self from Early Childhood to Early Adolescence.” In Narrative Development in Adolescence, Creating the Storied Self, XXXIII, edited by K. C. McLean and M. Pasupathi, 151–168. New York, NY: Springer Science Ricoeur, P. 1984. Time and Narrative I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. 1991. “Life in Quest of Narrative.” In Teoksessa David Wood (Toim.): On Paul Ricoeur, 20–33. London and New York: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roebben, B. 2009a. “Narthical Religious Learning: Redefining Religious Education in Terms of Pilgrimage.” British Journal of Religious Education 31 (1): 17–27. doi:10.1080/01416200802559957. Roebben, B. 2009b. Seeking Sense in the City: European Perspectives on Religious Education. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Schweitzer, F. 2012. “Religious Education, Identity and Faith in (Post-) Modernity: More than A Biographical Approach? A Personal Attempt at Finding the Red Thread in My Academic Work on Religious Education.” In On the Edge: (Auto) Biography and Pedagogical Theories on Religious Education, edited by I. Ter Avest. Amsterdam: Sense Publishers. Selçuk, M. 2008. “Who Am I between “Us” and “Them”?” Religious Education 103 (5): 511–516. doi:10.1080/ 00344080802426954. Steiner, K. L., D. B. Pillemer, D. K. Thomsen, and A. P. Minigan. 2014. “The Reminiscence Bump in Older Adults’ Life Story Transitions.” Memory 22: 1002–1009. doi:10.1080/09658211.2013.863358. Ter Avest, I., ed. 2012. On the Edge: (Auto)Biography and Pedagogical Theories on Religious Education. Amsterdam: Sense Publishers. Tillich, P. 1978. Systematic Theology. Vol. I. London: University of Chicago Press Vargas, L. 2006. “Transnational Media Literacy: Analytic Reflections on a Program with Latina Teens.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 28 (2): 267–285. doi:10.1177/0739986305285823.