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It addresses how emotion is treated as instrumental for “academic achievement,” overlooks how race, gender, culture, and context shape experiences, and favors individualistic models. 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\nEmma M. McMain & Zoe Higheagle Strong, Washington State University  \nAbstract  \nSince the turn of the twenty-first century, educational research on emotions and social emotional learning has increased substantially. With this influx is a need for more critical work that explores how such research can both challenge and reproduce social injustices. In this conceptual paper, we critically reflect on the first author’s thesis study to explore how Western-dominant frameworks of emotion can shroud marginalized ways of thinking, feeling, knowing, and being. Our paper is guided by the question, how can we explore social-emotional aspects of education in ways that dismantle the privileging of white, neoliberal, patriarchal, and colonial worldviews? We consider how such worldviews (which often partner with post-positivist paradigms) can 1) position emotions as instrumental toward the end goal of “academic achievement,” 2) neglect how race, ethnicity, gender, culture, and context shape people’s understandings and experiences of emotion, and 3) privilege individualistic models of emotion over relational, embodied, and collectivist understandings. The paper ends with an overview of three frameworks (one arts-based, one discourse-based, and one rooted in Indigenous pedagogies) that could be potential starting points toward transformative, decolonial explorations of emotion.  \nKeywords: Emotion, social emotional learning, critical reflection, decolonial education, culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogies  \nIn my second year of graduate school, Isat in a blue plastic chair in the fifth-grade wing ofan elementary school, conducting my Master’s thesis study. Recess had just ended and a torrent of students flooded the hallway, cheeks flushed from ball-throwing and voices still cranked to the outside setting. Beside me, my participant worked on a survey designed to measure her emotions: pride, excitement, frustration, and nine others, each listed beside a 1-10 scale. I had instructed her to accurately report on how strongly she felt each emotion in the moment, not yet disclosing that I had delivered a predictor variable—praise—a few minutes earlier. I was exploring whether two types of academic praise (“process praise”focused on effort and strategy use, versus “person praise”focused on inherent ability) predictedfifth-graders’ emotions in the midst ofa challenging puzzle. As a graduate student conducting a quasi-experimental study, I believed that “rigorous”research should attempt to control for all the “noise” in the world except for my variables of interest.  \nAs my participant hunched over her paper, the rest of her classmates barreling along behind us, I had to suppress a laugh at the irony of our situation. Here we were, both working to drown out the noise and commotion of a world that never holds still. My fascination with human  \nemotion, in all of its social, embodied dynamism, was reduced to a list of twelve words next to a scale of ten numbers. I asked myself, what assumptions about research, knowledge, and reality am I making, shaped by my experiences as a white, middle-class, young-adult woman who has spent more than eighteen years in Western institutions of education? How can I recognize my simultaneous reproduction of and resistance to dominant paradigms of social science? How can I learn from my own contradictions to support understandings of emotion that challenge the current hegemony of educational research?  \nIntroduction  \nStudents in educational research fields, including the first author of this paper, are often taught the pillars of post-positivist science without deeply interrogating the power relations that are embedded in research. Although the paradigm wars of the 1980s forged new paths for critical scholars (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018), post-positivism continues to act as a dominant paradigm in many","cbCaim2d7tWWNYDK","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaim2d7tWWNYDK","pdf",390240,"English","# Abstract\n# Introduction","[{\"question\":\"What concerns does the paper raise about emotion research in education?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that Western-dominant frameworks can challenge and reproduce social injustices, while treating emotions as instrumental to “academic achievement” and overlooking how social factors shape emotional experience.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the thesis study discussed in the paper relate to dominant paradigms?\",\"answer\":\"The thesis is described as quasi-experimental, manipulating types of praise and measuring students’ emotions, but the authors critique it for relying on “good” post-positivist criteria without fully considering constraints and alternatives.\"},{\"question\":\"What alternative frameworks does the paper propose?\",\"answer\":\"It ends with an overview of three frameworks—one arts-based, one discourse-based, and one rooted in Indigenous pedagogies—as potential starting points for transformative, decolonial explorations of emotion.\"}]","Troubling Dominant Understandings of Emotion in Educational Settings - A Critical Reflection on Research and Curriculum | PDF",1792089900,48]