Nurturing identity formation in adolescence through narrative learning: a dialogue between the pedagogies of media literacy and religious education

ABSTRACT

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 film-making which can engage the processes of interpretation and meaning-making, 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.

KEYWORDS:

• MLE (Media Literacy Education)
• C/RE (Catholic/Religious Education)
• adolescent identity formation
• narrative/autobiographical learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edward Wright

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.