REA Annual Meeting , Nov 8 - 10 ‘ Negotiating and constructing religious identities ’

What is ‘religious identity’ and how may schooling impact upon it? In this paper, I present an elementary theory of religious identity construction and negotiation, drawing upon the theoretical framework that emerged from extensive fieldwork as part of a study of adolescent Christians, Jews and Muslims in England undertaken for my DPhil at the University of Oxford. I suggest that a conception of religious identity negotiation and construction based upon sociological and anthropological theories has much potential for educators and educational researchers. This is because to understand the impact of schooling on religious identity construction, a theory must be sensitive to social context, structural factors and power-relations – and how such phenomena may be interpreted and acted upon by individuals. In the course of this argument, I refer to important empirical and theoretical studies in comparable areas of inquiry. Introduction: conceptions of religious identity in educational research Reflecting a dichotomy in identity theory more widely, conceptions of religious identity in educational research can be separated into two principal groups: those that assume a psychological conception of identity, and those that assume an anthropological or cultural studies conception of identity. The former, (e.g. Markstrom-Adams & Smith, 1996; Hunsberger et al., 2001; Rymarz & Graham, 2006; Bertram-Troost et al., 2006, 2007; Armet, 2009), adopt concepts that centre upon religious identity development or formation as a psychological process, while the latter focus on religious identity construction as a socially located process (e.g. Østberg, 2000; Zine, 2001; Peek, 2005). Studies of religious identity development in the psychological tradition use the adolescent identity development theory of the Freudian psychologist Erikson (1968) as their reference point by employing frameworks or measures derived from Marcia’s (1966, 1980) operationalization of Erikson’s theory. Marcia focused upon the psychological content of Erikson theory that posited adolescence as a crucial time in the human life-cycle consisting of a psychosocial ‘identity crisis’ whereby identity diffusion is overcome by adolescents’ ‘growing occupational and ideological commitment’ (Marcia, 1966, p. 551). Studies of religious identity development in the Marcian mould typically assume that there are four basic identity statuses through which adolescents may progress in order to achieve a coherent self-image and healthy psychological unity: foreclosure, that a choice of identity is made but without exploration; diffusion, no identity is formed and there has been no exploration; moratorium, no identity has been formed, but exploration has taken place; and identity achievement, identity has been formed after exploration has taken place. Quantitative studies of religious identity development use measures of identity status based on this model in statistical tests with measures of religiosity in order to understand the relationship between measures of religious socialization, or of religiosity, and identity status. Studies of this kind can be criticised on account of the assumptions of their conceptual frameworks. Eriksonian-Marcian frameworks (and studies using other positivist models of religiosity) focus upon participants’ interior psychological self-concept, rather than the cultural