Since 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.