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Abstract
This article explores the processes of religious identity development in a Caribbean-Chinese adolescent who is from a multifaith, multilingual home. Findings include (1) the youth developed a Christian religious identity through his multiple situatedness within home and school worlds that privileged that faith and the dominant language of English with which it was associated and (2) the youth’s limited knowledge of his mother’s Chinese languages was associated with his limited exploration of an additional religious faith within his home. While previous links have been established between youths’ religious and cultural identities, this analysis submits the significance of language in religious identity development.
Literacy research on young people’s religious identity development typically occurs with youths who are navigating a single religious faith that is tied to their and their families’ cultural and religious identities (Eakle, 2007; Sarroub, 2002). However, increasingly diverse nations are resulting in homes where multiple cultures, languages, and religious faiths coexist. For example, the 2010 U.S. Census reported that interracial and interethnic marriage grew by 28% in the last decade (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). It is important, then, to explore whether, why, and how the processes of religious identity development are different for youths who come from multiethnic, multifaith, and multilingual families.
Religious life is a key context for developing sophisticated language and literacy competencies that are beneficial to literacy engagements in school and other social contexts. These include interpretative capacities within and across texts containing complex and nuanced ideas and the ability to identify, articulate, and analyze points of convergence and debate (Eakle, 2007; Skerrett, 2014). Literacy competencies developed through religious life also include the capability to combine intellectual and moral reasoning on a range of issues for oneself and in conversation with others who may hold differing positions (Kapitzke, 1995; Sarroub, 2002). Youths who transact with multiple religious faiths and languages may develop these capacities in more elaborated forms. Given the centrality of language and literacy practices in religious life, literacy scholarship should make greater investments in understanding the processes and outcomes of religious identity development. Doing so can promote literacy theory building and instructional practices that better reflect and leverage the complex manifestations of diversity and its associated resources for student learning. This article explores two research questions:
Research Question 1: How did a Caribbean-Chinese youth understand and engage with multiple religions, cultures, and languages at home in developing his religious identity?
Research Question 2: How did the youth’s engagements with religion across school worlds influence his religious identity development?
Theoretical Frameworks
Recent and foundational theoretical works, including in literacy, have identified processes through which adolescents develop religious identities. Religiosity is both distinct from, and connected to, spirituality. King, Clardy, and Ramos (2013) write:
Religiousness refers to the extent to which an individual has a relationship with a particular institutionalized doctrine about ultimate reality…. Spirituality is not necessarily dependent on a religious tradition, but is often expressed within a religious context.” (p. 188)
Exploring spiritual development among 30 adolescents who represented eight religions and six countries, King et al. (2013) found three primary constructs through which spirituality developed either within or outside the adolescents’ belonging to an institutionalized religion: transcendence (pursuing connection with the sacred); fidelity, entailing commitment to beliefs, worldviews, and moral values including as expressed in sacred texts; and embodied practices of intentionally living out practices aligned with their spiritual beliefs and moral values.
Narrative and contemplative practices also contribute to adolescents’ religious identity development (Baker & Edwards, 2012; Visser-Vogel, Westerink, de Kock, Barnard, & Bakker, 2012). Narratives allow people to tell stories of how they come into religious identity (Visser-Vogel et al., 2012). Additionally, contemplation on issues of spirituality and religiosity in communities with identity agents such as religious teachers and parents can promote consolidation of youths’ religious identities (Baker & Edwards, 2012; Heath, 1983; Kapitzke, 1995). Heath’s (1983) landmark study in four religious communities in the southern United States found that across these communities, various levels of authority were afforded to different religious actors such as pastors, adults, and youth church members in interpreting biblical meanings that contributed to the nature and strength of individuals’ and communities’ religious identities.
Literature Review
Research studies illuminate the processes involved in adolescents’ religious identity development identified in the theories above. In relation to the centrality of a sacred text and beliefs to guide their daily practices (Heath, 1983; King, Clardy, & Ramos, 2013), I (Skerrett, 2016) have presented how a Christian Latina adolescent negotiated conflicts between the practices and beliefs espoused in the Bible and her other social practices and identities such as a flirt and hip-hop dancer. Francis and Robbins’s (2014) large-scale quantitative analysis of 547 adolescent males in England and Wales that self-identified as Christian or Muslim found that the youths held high regard for their religions’ sacred texts and viewed them as guiding wisdom for life.
Research also supports the theoretical tenet of dialogue in communal spaces with others who both share and differ in religious beliefs for youths’ consolidation of religious identity (Visser-Vogel et al., 2012). I have shown (Skerrett, 2014) how a group of students and their literacy teacher developed strategies for maintaining healthy classroom community when conflicting perspectives on the Christian faith erupted, animated by literature study. Ding (2009) and Daguo (2012), in their studies of Chinese graduate students in the UK, called for intercultural dialogue and understanding about the cultural and religious values and beliefs of Chinese students rather than impositions of dominant Western religious beliefs onto them.
In relation to narrative and contemplative practices as religious identity-making processes (Baker & Edwards, 2012; Visser-Vogel et al., 2012), Reyes (2009) examined a scrapbook her participant, Zulmy, created, discovering notes and letters from her friends that sometimes invoked Zulmy’s God and religion, pictures of friends and teacher-mentors, inspirational poems, religious sayings, and symbols and images of popular culture Zulmy enjoyed. Reyes (2009) conceptualized the scrapbook as a personal space in which Zulmy reflected on her spirituality and the materialism of the world in which she lived.
Finally, the concept of embodied practices of religion and spirituality as an identity-making process (Heath, 1983; King et al., 2013) is also supported by research. Scholars have identified how praying, worship practices, and aligning behaviors to fit with religious doctrine are all significant performances of, and contributors to, youths’ religious identities (Daguo, 2012; Eakle, 2007). Daguo (2012) described the responses of Chinese students who were brought into Christian religious practices such as communion (consuming bread and wine to acknowledge Jesus Christ’s death to save humans from sin) through a religious-based university support group. The Chinese students’ responses ranged from conversion to Christianity, contemplation, and active resistance to what some of them understood as forcible proselytizing.
Telling portraits illuminate the processes through which young adults develop or strengthen a single religious identity. Yet, little is understood about how youths transact with multiple religions within and across home and other social contexts in composing their religious identities. Furthermore, literacy research knows little about the influences of multilingualism in youths’ religious identity development. This analysis intends to help fill this gap.
Method
This article derives from an ongoing qualitative inquiry (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2013), now in its fourth year, into the literate lives of youths whose lives are stretched across Dutch Sint Maarten and French Saint Martin in the Caribbean and major U.S. urban centers such as in Florida and New York. The 4-month-long classroom-based research on which this article draws also employed qualitative methods (Miles et al., 2013). I took on dual roles of researcher and literacy teacher with six adolescents at a school on Sint Maarten where I have conducted research for 4 years. My goals with this researcher–teacher endeavor were to implement socioculturally informed approaches to literacy instruction to augment the predominately autonomous-based models (Street, 1995) student-participants described experiencing across their educational lives and which I had also observed as a researcher at their current school. In students’ descriptions and my observations, I understood literacy instruction and learning as delivery and acquisition of predetermined discrete sets of knowledge and skills (Street, 1995). Guided by Bomer (2011) and Skerrett (2015), I designed and implemented three curriculum units—an inquiry into literate lives unit, an independent reading unit, and a unit called intentionality in building our literate lives. These units reflected a sociocultural approach (Street, 1995) in that teaching and learning were based in knowledge and appreciation of students’ sociocultural knowledge, experiences, and identities and sought to jointly build their academic and broader literacy competencies and identities.
Setting
Sint Maarten is an ideal site for conducting research on literacy and diversity, including religious diversity. It is the number one receiving country for intra-Caribbean migration and hosts residents from over 120 nations with their attendant cultures, religions, and languages (Cepal, 2002; Government of Sint Maarten, 2014). The island remains under the governance of its colonizer, Holland, and its official languages are Dutch and English. For this analysis, it is important to understand that the Dutch Netherlands, including Sint Maarten, have a long tradition of subsidizing religiously affiliated and private secular schools as long as these schools integrate the national curriculum. Furthermore, Sint Maarten families have a history of selecting religiously affiliated schools for their children based on social and academic criteria even though these schools may not reflect the families’ religious beliefs (Center on International Education Benchmarking, 2009; Skerrett, 2015, 2016).
Focal school
Triumph Multiage School (TMS) is a low cost, private, Christian school located in an urban area in Sint Maarten and was founded in 2006. (All school and participant names are pseudonyms.) TMS accepts students from any or no religious affiliation. The school’s average student population is 50 due to its small capacity and high student mobility. The school is organized into two multiage classrooms each with its own teacher: an elementary classroom serving students 5–11 years old, and a secondary classroom serving students 12 years and older. The school principal and its two teachers identify as Black Caribbean women with English as their primary language. The student population is primarily Black Caribbean and English-language dominant, with a smaller percentage representing other cultures and languages such as Indian-, Latin@-, and Chinese-Caribbean. Reflecting the autonomous view of literacy (Street, 1995), TMS uses a prepackaged curriculum imported from a Christian U.S.-based curriculum provider that infuses religious content across all subject areas. Students progress through content area workbooks in an individualized, self-paced approach with their teachers serving as tutors.
Focal Participant
Peter (all students selected their pseudonyms) was born on Sint Maarten and is 14 years old at the time of this writing. Peter identified as “Sint Maarten-Chinese” (personal communication, May 4, 2017), given that “my mother’s from China and my father’s from Jamaica” (personal communication, February 17, 2016). Peter spoke a nearly fluent, soft-spoken English. His classmates frequently asked him to speak up or revoiced and elaborated upon his original comments to build up his ideas in classroom conversation. Peter spoke Cantonese as a child, a family home language, but now primarily understood it. He connected the onset of this linguistic loss to beginning formal education: “I spoke until I was six so I learned English after [in primary school]” and by age 13 Peter “couldn’t speak [Cantonese] but I could understand it” (personal communication, February 17, 2016). In addition to Cantonese, Peter’s mother spoke Mandarin and Hakka and had been “trying to learn English” (personal communication, February 17, 2016). On his mother’s English acquisition progress, Peter remarked, “She says she understands English. Sometimes she gets it; sometimes she gets it wrong” (personal communication, May 4, 2017).
Peter’s father is biracial and bicultural, born to a Black Jamaican woman and an Asian man. Peter reported, “My uncle Vincent [who] was born in Jamaica told me he thinks my grandfather was from Korea. But I actually never met my grandfather” (personal communication, May 4, 2017). Upon meeting Peter’s father, this biracial, bicultural blend was evident to me in his phenotypic appearance. Peter commented his father spoke “a bit of Spanish, English, Cantonese, a little bit of French” (personal communication, May 4, 2017). This multilingualism reflected Peter’s father’s Asian and Jamaican linguistic heritage as well as the languages of Dutch Sint Maarten and French Saint Martin where the family operated a grocery store. Peter identified his father and himself as Christian and his mom as Buddhist (personal communications, February 17, 2016 and May 4, 2017). The two schools where Peter received the majority of his education were English-language run, Christian schools.
Selecting Peter as the case
Of the six participants in the classroom-based research, Peter was purposively selected for this analysis (Miles et al., 2013), given that he and his family illustrated the most unique blend of multicultural, multilingual, and multifaith backgrounds. Three of the six participants identified as Black, St. Maarten-born youths from Christian, English-speaking homes. One participant came from a Black Latino (Honduran) background and did not describe his family as religious. The sixth participant was a Guyanese-born young woman of Indian descent whose primary home language was English. Her cultural background and related Muslim faith was relatively well represented on St. Maarten in comparison to Peter and his family’s linguistic, cultural, and religious identities.
Researcher
I am a faculty member at a U.S. university and identify as a Black, Caribbean-born U.S. immigrant. English is my first and only language. I also identify as a Protestant Christian. My own affiliation with the religious faith Peter claimed required that I maintain a judicious stance throughout the research process. I intentionally probed into all leadings of Peter’s talk about different religions and employed theoretical frameworks developed from multiple religions for conducting data analysis. Doing so built in strategies for reducing bias toward findings that privileged Christianity in Peter’s religious identity development.
Data and Analysis
Data
Data from the 4-month classroom research include two semistructured, in-depth interviews of each student participant—at the beginning and end of the classroom research; video and audio recordings, photographs, and observation notes of all class sessions; and teaching and learning artifacts including lesson plans, curriculum texts used, and student work. I also conducted a third interview with student participants in early May 2017, 1 year after the conclusion of the classroom research. I inquired into students’ thinking about their literacy development, any influences of the classroom research on that development, and general reflections on the project. For this analysis, I draw on two interviews with Peter—on February 17, 2016 lasting 56 min, and May 4, 2017 lasting 1 hr, 40 min—in which he delivered his narratives of religious identity development; an interview with TMS’ principal on February 24, 2016, in which she elaborated on the Christian elements of the school and its curriculum; and a transcript from a 90-min class session on March 15, 2016, that displays Peter’s active production of religious identity through embodied practice and dialogue. These selected data align with theory related to the processes of religious identity development in youths and the methodological insistence on narratives (Baker & Edwards, 2012; Visser-Vogel et al., 2012).
Analysis
I conducted a thematic analysis, reducing the data using the research questions as a guide through a process of iterative reading and progressive focusing (Glaser & Strauss, 2006). As relevant data were identified, I began memoing (Charmaz, 2006), taking extensive notes on initial impressions, thoughts, and questions about the data and making rudimentary theoretical and research-related connections. Open coding across the reduced data set identified words and phrases related to Peter’s development of religious identity such as “language” and “Christian schools.” Focused coding led to the development of broad categories such as “participation in religious activities” that reflected significant emerging themes in the data.
Analysis then shifted to creating a story line (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) across categories that explained the processes involved in Peter’s development of a particular (Christian) religious identity. This last stage of analysis included additional memoing that grounded the story line within related theory and research (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) and facilitated implications of this inquiry for literacy research. Here, I considered how the processes of religious identity formation offered by the extant theory and research had not adequately accounted for youths who came from multifaith homes and in which multiple languages also coexisted.
Findings
Analysis found that Peter developed a Christian religious identity through his multiple situatedness within home and school worlds that privileged that faith and the dominant language of English with which it was associated, a language Peter also claimed as his primary tongue. In a related vein, analysis indicated that Peter’s limited knowledge of his mother’s Chinese languages was associated with his limited exploration of an additional religious faith within his home. In the section below, I explore how the process of developing a Christian religious identity was entangled with language and manifested in Peter’s home. In the section that follows, I examine how Peter’s process of becoming a Christian was buttressed by his literacy education in English across two Christian-based school worlds—St. Johns Primary and TMS, where I met and taught Peter. At TMS, I further illustrate how mobilizing and transforming my literacy research, role, and body facilitated religious- and linguistic-related conflict in school that animated new religious identity-making processes for Peter.
Building Christian Identity Within a Multilingual and Multifaith Home
As detailed in introducing Peter, his home offered a variety of languages, cultures, and two primary religions from which to compose his own religious identity. In attempting to explore the full terrain of students’ literate lives and given that the research occurred at a Christian school, one of the questions in the first interview asked students about religiosity in their and their families’ lives. In our interview on February 17, 2016, from which the data in this paragraph derive, I asked Peter whether he would describe his family as religious and if his family practiced any religion at home. Peter responded, “My father is a Christian.” He immediately qualified that claim: “I’m not sure if my father’s a Christian but he always says that he’s going to church.” Peter’s family supermarket operated every day, and his father “used to [go to church] until he had to work [on Sundays].” Peter thus indicated that sustained participation in communal religious activities was an important indicator and promoter of religious faith although one’s spirituality could not be judged primarily by that measure (Baker & Edwards, 2012; Visser-Vogel et al., 2012). When I asked Peter whether he attended church or engaged in religious practices with his father, Peter replied “not once.” He recalled, however, how “I did went to a Christian church with one of my friends and his mother when I was 10.”
Peter’s mother claimed and practiced another religious faith, Buddhism. According to Peter, his mother was accepting of multiple faiths coexisting within the home. “My father’s a Christian so she really doesn’t mind I’m a Christian. She says everyone has their own religions” [Interview, May 4, 2017]. Peter had limited understanding of Buddhism, his mother’s religion. In our February 17, 2016, interview he commented, “My mother…she worship a Chinese god or something.” I probed Peter further in our May 4, 2017, interview about how much he understood about Buddhism, whether his mother had tried to teach him about this religion, and whether he himself had been, or was currently interested in, learning more about it. In this May interview, Peter explained that when he was around 8 years old, he “tried one time to look up the Buddhist. I found big words but I didn’t understand.” Regarding his mother serving as a religious tutor, Peter remarked he had asked his mother to explain her religion to him “just one time; never again. Because she’ll start to tell me about it and never stops. She mixes the languages [Cantonese, Mandarin, and Hakku] and I don’t understand. And she’ll add in something random [not related to religion].” Analysis thus indicated that Peter’s limited understanding of his mother’s Chinese languages constrained Peter’s ability to adequately explore his mother’s religious faith and consider Buddhism in his religious identity making process.
In the February 17, 2016, interview, I asked Peter whether he engaged in religious practices with his mother and he answered with a firm “no.” In that interview, Peter described an incident at home, when he was 7, when his mother engaged him in her religious rites.
I did see her once and I told her why she’s doing that and she tell me just follow her and do this. And she light um this tree stick and it was burning smoke and I had to hold it in my hand and bow it down and lift it back up…while my mom was speaking.
Peter clarified in our May 4, 2017, interview that his mother was using Chinese languages in this event. Accordingly, Peter, who had limited knowledge of his mother’s religion—neither from textual readings nor her personal explanations of it, and who was not linguistically strong in his mother’s Chinese languages—had few meaning-making tools with which to understand, contemplate about, or appreciate the practice he was engaging. His response was to take a commonsense stance on this religious activity by articulating a safety concern about burning a stick inside the house. This reasoning of Peter’s angered his mother who was prioritizing the authenticity of her religious practices. “When I told her that she shouldn’t put smoke she started cussing me about you have to put smoke. And that [stick] was actually on fire and she just left it there” (personal communication, February 17, 2016). Peter reported that consequently, he had practiced religion with his mother “only once” (personal communication, February 17, 2016).
This closing statement of “only once” suggested an early religious rift had been created between Peter and his mother that had not been repaired. Peter believed that “actually if I talk about my mom’s religious things, she’ll probably get angry at me” (personal communication, February 17, 2016). Peter’s perspective mirrored some of the youths’ in Moulin’s (2015) study who felt that taking their religious questions home would not result in generative dialogue. Peter held a tenuous stance toward learning more about his mother’s religion. In our May interview, he commented, “I’m not sure if I want to learn more about it. There’s a possibility but I’m not sure. I wouldn’t say I’m not interested at all” (personal communication, May 4, 2017).
In an effort to contextualize Peter’s mother’s religious faith within the broader Sint Maarten social context, I asked Peter “does your mom go to a place of worship or does she just practice her religion at home,” to which he responded “at home” (personal communication, February 17, 2016). Peter confirmed in the May interview, “there’s no Buddhist temple.…She has a statute that she worships. It’s at home. A small statue, a lady. There’s another [smaller] statue, a guy…a fat person with some necklace” (personal communication, May 4, 2017). Thus, Peter’s mother did not have access to an organized religious institution that would provide physical infrastructures and other resources such as communal dialogue and identity agents (Heath, 1983; Kapitzke, 1995; Visser-Vogel et al., 2012) to help teach her son about this available religious identity. Indeed, scholars such as Wang and Yang (2006) have criticized the limited institutionalized spaces available to Chinese immigrants to practice their religions in Western contexts.
Theory and research confirm that formal knowledge of sacred texts; sustained engagement, including dialogue, in religious communities of practice; and identity agents, such as parents and religious teachers, are key to youths’ generation of religious identity (Francis & Robbins, 2014; Juzwik, 2014; Visser-Vogel et al., 2012). Peter found limited opportunities to engage with these processes of religious identity formation at home in either of the available religions within his family. He found plentiful opportunities for engaging these processes in relation to the Christian faith, however, in school worlds.
Building Christian Identity Across School Worlds
Schools (both secular and religious based) are significant sites for religious identity development (Eakle, 2007; Heath, 1983; Kapitzke, 1995; Skerrett, 2014, 2016). To explore the influences of school worlds on Peter’s religious identity development, I focused on two Christian, English-run schools (one Catholic, the other Protestant) where Peter received the majority of his education. Analysis found that substantive opportunities to engage with the knowledge and practices of the Christian faith through the English language, a language Peter himself claimed as his dominant language, enhanced his Christian identity making across these school worlds.
St. Johns was a primary school run by a Catholic school board on Sint Maarten. In interviews of a sample of teachers, students, and principals at schools from different religiously affiliated school boards (Skerrett, 2016), I learned that religious elements of these schools included morning prayer and other religious rites at school assemblies, religious studies classes, and requirements that students attend significant religious events associated with that particular faith, for example, Good Friday services in the case of the Catholic school board. The school world of St. Johns thus offered Peter a rich sociocultural context for developing a Christian religious identity. Peter attended St. Johns from ages 6–11 and confirmed these experiences of religious education in our February 17, 2016 interview.
[T]hroughout my school at St. Johns, I always had to go to church and once a month or so because we had to worship and stuff. We had to walk from the school…all the way to the Catholic church.
Peter further described the religious practices of Mass services that students were expected to perform: “Everyone had to go sing…and say a prayer etcetera.” When I asked what he thought about these religious practices and participating in them, Peter responded, “I kind of cared.”
Given the extensiveness of religiosity at this school that Peter attended over a 5-year period, I asked Peter about the degree to which religious teaching and practices at St. Johns shaped his own religious identity.
I know you do these things as part of your school but do you do them on your own? As just a part of who you are? Do you like pray at home? Do you think about a God or is it just part of the school things that you do?
Peter articulated a personal Christian faith with language that signaled formal religious knowledge and practices.
I think there’s God.
When you say a God do you mean…like the Christian God that you learn about in the curriculum? Is it maybe a Chinese God? Some God?
I just think they are three, the Trinity [a Christian theological term referring to the interrelating of God the father, Jesus the son, and the Holy Spirit], the Christian God (personal communication, February 17, 2016).
Peter admitted to praying “sometimes” to the Christian God outside school in a “random” fashion (personal communication, February 17, 2016). With his father also claiming a Christian identity at home, which Peter understood more deeply through school experiences, analysis indicated that Peter came to more fully claim his own religious identity as Christian through engagements with that faith in school. The limited nature of his self-sponsored religious activities outside school, however, did not reflect the qualities of highly religious or spiritual youths (Baker & Edwards, 2012; Visser-Vogel et al., 2012). It is also significant that Peter did not describe religious identity-building processes at school such as dialogue and contemplation about religious knowledge. Hence, Peter’s religious education at St. Johns reflected how religious education in school is often reduced to an acritical transmission and acceptance of religious doctrine (Juzwik, 2014; Kapitzke, 1995).
TMS
Peter’s second educational experience at a religious-based school was at TMS, a Christian (Protestant based) school. He was halfway through his first year there when we met. TMS was the only Christian-based school on Sint Maarten where, in addition to the religious elements found in other religiously affiliated schools, the entire curriculum was infused with Christianity. As Principal Janet put it:
We are the only school providing a Christian curriculum in entirety. The principles of Christendom are worked directly into math, English, science, and social studies.…That [her emphasis] you will not find on another campus outside of the devotions in the morning or religious studies as a curriculum. (personal communication, February 24, 2016)
In our interview on February 17, 2016, Peter described how the religious rites at TMS felt “actually normal for me. Because from primary grades [at St. Johns]…we’d have to pray. Three times [daily].” Regarding the religious content interwoven into the curriculum, Peter gave an example of how “the Bible was mixed with the Social Studies.” He added that given his extensive religious studies classes at St. Johns, he had been excused from Bible coursework at TMS. “I already know the Bible stuff, I really don’t have to take the Bible [course].” Peter’s experiences at TMS solidified his self-ascribed identity as a Christian, providing an additional world where Protestant religious knowledge was held as truth, its daily practices were normalized in a communal space, and its sacred knowledge was integrated into academic texts with teacher guides who also served as religious identity agents (Baker & Edwards, 2012; Juzwik, 2014).
As with St. Johns, and in keeping with research (Moulin, 2015), Peter’s religious education at TMS included vetting of texts that could enter this school world. An independent reading unit I implemented with Peter and his classmates however, brought into the classroom secular and religious texts that reflected the diverse literacy interests, identities, and activities students had claimed in the previous inquiry into literate lives unit. These texts created an opportunity for Peter to agentively claim and perform his Christian religious identity. Importantly, Peter expressed his religious identity through statements of moral beliefs and values, a key way in which youths display their religious identities (Baker & Edwards, 2012; Moulin, 2015; Visser-Vogel et al., 2012). As this episode will also show, Peter’s assertion of moral beliefs and values resulted in Peter’s peers invoking Peter’s and his family’s linguistic competencies, supporting this article’s assertion about the entanglement of language with religious identity development.
In the inquiry into literate lives unit, Peter expressed a love for sketching and an interest in architectural drawing and design. Accordingly, in creating a classroom library for the subsequent independent reading unit, books on architectural design and sketching were intentionally included with Peter in mind. On day two of the independent reading unit (the data below are taken from a video-recorded classroom session on March 15, 2016), students were taught (through modeling and other scaffolds) the strategy of writing on sticky notes during reading as a tool to think about and understand their texts more deeply (Bomer, 2011). Students went into 15 min of reading time and were reminded to use at least one sticky note during this time.
Peter indeed selected a book on architectural drawing and design from the classroom library. At the 5-min reminder to write on a sticky note, Peter asked, “how do you spell ‘censored?’” I spelled the word for Peter and he then asked for a tab to mark a page in the book and proceeded to write on a sticky note. The following classroom transcript excerpt describes the classroom interaction that followed related to Peter’s religious and linguistic identities. Students are sitting in a circle and sharing out what each of them has written on their sticky notes.
I just wrote in mine “should be censored.”
Tell us about that. What was that all about?
It had stuff that wasn’t supposed to be seen.
That’s because you have to be mature about it.
Is there something in that book that is inappropriate? Can you hand me that book?
Pictures that wouldn’t be appropriate for a Christian school environment. Like drawings of parts of the body.
[Laughter]
[looking at the page Peter has marked] So this is not…
not Phallic
So this is a part of the book talking about human scale in architecture, about the human body and drawing it to scale. So in the case of a book about drawing, I think it is appropriate because we know a lot of art is about the human body.
If someone reads it…
You just have to be mature about it.
He’s too young to understand the words, only the pictures.
If you take it home and your mom and dad see it?
Is this something you’d feel comfortable taking home and your parents seeing that picture?
I’d probably get grounded.
So if your family would be upset about you reading that, that’s not probably a book to take home.
Don’t show your mom and daddy. Unless they can read English.
Actually, they read and speak English and some other languages.
Thank you for saying that, Peter. Your family reads and writes multiple languages which is a great asset to have, right?
Peter’s strong performance of religious identity was facilitated by a curricular text that was different from his typical curricula of vetted and sacred texts that were presented to students as beyond critical analysis (Juzwik, 2014). This episode of conflict was significant for strengthening Peter’s religious identity. It propelled him to embody practices (initiating and sustaining religiously related moral argumentation with others) that also displayed fidelity to the moral values and beliefs associated with his religious faith. Embodiment of, and maintaining fidelity to, particular moral beliefs and values are two of the three tenets identified in King et al.’s (2013) religious identity development framework, a framework that was generated from studying multiple religions.
Language manifested in significant ways in this dialogue. Some students levied deficit charges about Peter’s psychological maturity and cognition in English. Another student presumed from Peter’s ethnocultural background the possibility that his parents might not read English and suggested to Peter he could exploit that situation to disobey his parents’ moral expectations of him by bringing this text home. Peter rebuked these assaults through narrative (Visser-Vogel et al., 2012). He insisted on aligning his religious stance and behaviors surrounding this text (criticism and refusal) with his and his family’s moral values notwithstanding language differences. As King et al.’s (2013) theory suggests, Peter’s moral claim about the inappropriateness of this text for a religious youth would find support in both religions at home. Finally, Peter repositioned his and his family’s linguistic repertoires from a perspective of lack of English to one of linguistic wealth (Heath, 1983). This dialogue, including Peter’s majority role, provided strong evidence for the associations between language and religious identity development.
Implications
This analysis has explored an underexamined phenomenon of how an adolescent who came from a multifaith home experienced the process of religious identity development. The study thus expands the existing knowledge base in literacy research related to youths’ religious identity development that has been primarily developed from youths’ transactions with their families’ singular faith (Eakle, 2007; Reyes, 2009; Skerrett 2014, 2016). Furthermore, moving beyond existing knowledge of the interrelationships between religion and culture (Heath, 1983; Sarroub, 2002), this study indicates that language plays a significant role in the religious identity development of youths who come from multicultural, multifaith, and multilingual homes. Thus, this study calls for greater attention to the role of language in conceptual and empirical research about the processes involved in youths’ religious identity development. Literacy scholarship pertaining to youths who claim a single faith has been illuminating the complex literacy capacities that youths develop through religious life and suggesting how literacy teachers can connect those strengths to building academic, civic, and social literacies (Eakle, 2007; Skerrett 2014, 2016). Youths who transact with multiple faiths and languages in developing religious identities seem uniquely positioned to build even more robust literacy competencies that can be leveraged for more powerful learning in literacy classrooms. This phenomenon presents a well-warranted agenda for future literacy research.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors received financial support from The University of Texas at Austin for the research.
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Author Biography
Allison Skerrett is an associate professor of language and literacy studies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Austin.
