This chapter examines McDermott's question of how it was that the focal children came to 'look differentially able' in kindergarten. This kindergarten was arranged so as to have able and non-able members and, as observed in Chapter 1, many institutions globally engage in the practice of ranking persons, and in so doing they attach persons to individualities (Foucault, 1972). In this chapter I identify some of the metrics upon which the children in this study were judged as students, and discuss how rankings based on such metrics emphasised certain kinds of knowledge while ignoring and suppressing others. McDermott (1988) urged interrogating the practices that make stratification make sense in certain communities: in the present case, I do not ask how or why some children were 'better' than others at learning English or, indeed, learning anything, or even why individual children were considered to have more or less potential. Rather, taking McDermott's advice, I am concerned with how it is we evaluate some children as successful (learning or having more) and others as unsuccessful (learning or having less).

From a sociocultural theory (SCT) perspective, identities are socially ascribed, but also are formed through the agency of human subjects. Identities take on their particularities in the practices of specific communities, and thus are complex, sometimes contradictory, and changing. In shaded paragraphs throughout this chapter, I point out how a new materialist view of identity as a dynamic and relational phenomenon/event, agency as distributed among assemblages of human and non-human things, and language learning as intra-actions among different kinds of 'stuff' might offer some additional insights into these matters and, perhaps more importantly, may offer ideas for pedagogy.