ABSTRACT
This chapter describes ways for teachers and students to employ languaging as actions to engage in relational ways of being to create supportive/caring relations with others within specific classroom events. Establishing supportive/caring relations serves to enhance students’ willingness to engage in honest, open-ending interactions with others. Students develop in their learning how their languaging actions serves to enhance relational ways of being with others in events through engaging in metacognitive reflection about those events through writing or discussing about interactions with others as well as the use of labels or categories for defining others. Students can also analyze use of discourses as ways of knowing and thinking constituting their relations with others; for example, how discourses of race constitutes these relations. Given the increasing diversity of students from different linguistic backgrounds, teachers need to become familiar with the variation in languages students bring to the classroom in order to accommodate to those variations through adoption of a translanguaging perspective, as well as having students reflect on how they move between different languages across different contexts
