Learning of any kind influences identities, those constructions of self that have meaning in a social context, that define the self to the self and to others (Woods and Jeffrey 2002). In our past research we looked at the personal identities young participants construct in the light of their creative learning experiences (Jeffrey Forthcoming). Pollard and Filer (1999) identified three contributing groups of factors to a learner identity – relationship of self and others, potential and resources. We focused on the first in our previous research (Jeffrey Forthcoming) Potential is the biological endowment and resources are the role of material, cultural and linguistic factors that affect identity and is it this aspect we focus upon in this paper, Pollard and Filer (1999) go on to describe young children’s learning career as ‘a continuous spiral’ in which identity is seen as a representation of the self-belief and self-confidence which learners bring to new learning challenges and contexts. They also identified an aspect of self and identity that is concerned with: what they become through interaction with significant others, their experience of new learning opportunities and their engagement with dominant social representations within their culture. (Pollard and Filer 1999) It is the actual experience of becoming that is the subject of this paper, of what meaning learners are assigning to their experiences and what kind of identities are evolving. Meaning is how the experiences are felt emotionally, interpreted, acted upon, how they contribute to the play on self and the development of identity. The context is the material, cultural and linguistic aspects of performative practices in English primary schools, mainly through young participant’s perspectives of targets, personal assessments and standardized testing. These practices are concerned with ensuring a continuing improvement in each young person’s achievements and progress through the setting of public and personal targets, in which parents and personalized learning are employed. It also concerns the assignment of young participants to a numerical, ciphered level of achievement in the three main subjects, literacy, maths and science and the challenge to raise oneself to a higher level as a continuing aspiration. The third element is a regular standardized testing regime which, although supposed to support teacher assessments counts as the definitive definition of a person for parents, teachers and young participants. We explore, through ethnographic methodology in one primary school the ways in which young participants educational identities are constructed by influential resources and how they reconstruct their personal identities to ensure their social inclusion, absorbing their assigned identities into their self-concept. Personal identities refer to the ‘meanings attributed to the self by the actor,’ and are ‘self-designations and self-attributions brought into play during the course of interaction’ (Ball 1972). They may be consistent or inconsistent with social identities. The self-concept is the ‘overarching view of oneself as a physical, social, spiritual, or moral being’, and is ‘a kind of working compromise between idealized images and imputed social identities’ (Woods and Jeffrey 2002).

The research methods were ethnographic with the aim of accumulating rich data pertaining to the issues under examination, and to produce 'thick description' (Geertz 1973) and although we are unable to claim empirical generalizability the research was strongly grounded in a wealth of detail concerning teacher strategies, characteristics of creative learning and the meaning of creative learning for the young participants. Over a period of time the researcher was able to select in an intermittent fashion (Jeffrey and Troman 2004) relevant events to observe as and when it became clear that they would assist the research. Ensuring flexibility with the researcher’s time as in an ethnographic approach enabled the researcher to immerse himself in the activity and engage in debates with students concerning their experience. The characterization (Jeffrey Forthcoming) of creative learning reflects the efforts made by young participants in the CLASP research to be innovative as they crafted their work, to strive to develop their identity in relation to projects over time and the feeling of personal worth seen through the construction of a learner identity. The sample is a range of 30 plus elementary school children in an England primary school in group conversations with the researcher and field notes from over 20 days fieldwork in the school and in classrooms including performative situations.

The expected outcomes are that the young participants appeared to accept their performative role, that they used the language of challenge, improvement, targets and achievement to explain their situations and that they found both benefits and drawbacks from being placed in performative situations and being given assigned identities of achieving levels, albeit ones that they were striving to improve.