The Construction of Performative Identities

Source: European Educational Research Journal, Volume 10 Number 4, 2011. p. 484‑501.

This article describes the Economic and Social Research Council-based research project.
This project examines the ways in which Lyotard’s performative practices affect the identities of primary school learners and how they are constructed by Key Stage exam process.
This project also examines performative progression through a system of learning targets.

The project uses a Foucauldian approach to show how learners are influenced by performativity discourses and how they take part in constructing these performative identities.

Employing an ethnographic approach, the project illustrates how Foucault’s social relations characteristic of extra/intra/inter dependencies is explicated through governmentality and the construction of knowledge and subjectivity, which act as major relays through which learners’ performative identities become embedded.