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Trauma-informed school practices require enactment of trauma-informed principles including prioritizing students’ physical and psychological safety, connection, cultural responsiveness, and student empowerment. These principles frequently challenge teachers’ preexisting beliefs about rules, consequences, and the intention behind student behaviors. In this case, an early career principal must address the actions of several teachers who chose to reinstate a previously existing seclusion room that had been transformed into a food pantry. The case highlights issues in supporting staff divided around school change, being an early career school leader in a rural school with high leadership turnover, and managing relationships between staff and external school partners.

Lyn Mikel Brown and Jenny Flaumenhaft describe the use of student-centered principles to engage in curricular reform in an underresourced rural elementary school. With a specific focus on student empowerment and self-determination, and in collaboration with students and teachers, Transforming Rural Experience in Education (TREE) integrated students’ desire for more movement and time outdoors into the curriculum through project-based activities called somedays and microadventures. Making the curriculum more student-driven has been especially helpful for students who have experienced trauma and a loss of control. In the second year of the curricular redesign, students and teachers are more engaged, school climate has improved, and standardized test scores are up.

This interchange explores the role of girl (ages thirteen to twenty-two) activism in the USA organisation SPARK (Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge). Some of the many initiatives and programmes SPARK has enacted with girls, including online forums, blog spaces, marches, and summits directly address recent calls to attend to the complexity in understanding and resisting ‘sexualisation’ with teen girls. Several of the girls’ media appearances are explored in detail to illustrate the dynamics of girls’ agency and resistance that emerge in their embodied engagements with ‘sexualisation’.

For over a century, psychologists have described adolescence as a time of heightened psychological risk for girls. This article explores a relational impasse or crisis of connection that we have observed in girls' lives at adolescence by tracing through time the thoughts and feelings of two 12-year-old girls who were interviewed as part of a 5-year longitudinal study of girls' psychological development. Using a voice-centered relational method, we join the experiences of struggle and resistance at this developmental juncture with the problems that have been seen as central to the psychology of women.