Social, emotional, and affective experiences are impossible to separate from thinking, doing, and being in the world. Increasingly, schools and community-based organizations are recognizing this truth through the adoption of programs that focus on the emotional lives of children and youth, especially when emotions are fraught, and lives have been difficult. Programs such as social emotional learning (SEL) frameworks and trauma-informed practices (TIP) are not only popular, they are deemed “essential” in almost every corner of the social services sector.

Advocates for these programs claim that SEL and TIP create a necessary foundation for greater self- awareness, better relationships, and improved learning capacities for children and youth. We, along with other authors in this issue, suggest that these programs often focus on those who are marginalized through race, class, and/or experiences of violence, including family violence, while ignoring the social conditions that create marginalization and its effects, and neglecting the many strengths and strategies deployed by these children and youth. This focus can lead to labeling and/or silencing legitimate expressions of resistance and difference in a quest to elicit specific types of behavioral and cultural conformity for students to be deemed “learning ready” (e.g., Crampton, Pyscher & Robinson, 2018; Pyscher, 2019).