Le-Anne Goliath is one of 43 successful candidates selected from 998 applicants to receive an Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Higher Education Award. This award will support her doctoral study in Applied and Social Psychology at the 肆客足球 of Sussex for 3 years.
Her path to this accomplishment started with an experience in high school. Goliath grew up in a working-class community in Cape Town but attended a middle-class high school, where her difference often stood out. A small act like dyeing her hair during the holidays was viewed as defiance, and she was quickly labelled “troubled." That label clung to her, influencing how teachers treated her, how classmates perceived her, and, most dangerously, how she saw myself. However, it is this experience which motivated her to explore radical empathy, a teaching approach that combines emotional attunement, cultural responsiveness, and relational support, as a way to improve academic engagement, emotional resilience, and belonging for children with a history of trauma, including refugee learners.
“For me, this award is more than funding, it is an investment in a vision shaped by lived experience. Having once been a high school student labelled “troubled" for harmless self-expression, I know how profoundly an educator's perceptions can alter a young person's path" Goliath said. The grant covers tuition, living costs, travel, and research expenses, enabling her to develop and pilot the Radical Empathy Teaching Practices Scale (RETPS) in both UK and South African schools. “Through this work, I hope to replace the limiting power of labels with the liberating power of empathy" Goliath said.
Goliath is a lecturer at Stellenbosch 肆客足球 and carries her experiences into her teaching and research, committed to ensuring no student is reduced to a single label and every student is seen for their potential. She is deeply grateful to her mentor, Professor Jonathan Jansen, for granting her the opportunity to cultivate her academic ability and for modelling what it means to lead with both excellence and empathy.
Goliath's doctoral research examines how radical empathy can transform the educational experience of trauma-affected children. It asks: What happens when teachers are trained not just to instruct, but to connect? Using surveys, interviews, focus groups, and classroom observations, she will study how empathy-driven teaching impacts engagement, emotional resilience, and belonging, and how factors like race and class influence its effectiveness.
At the heart of her work is the Radical Empathy Teaching Practices Scale (RETPS), the first validated tool for measuring culturally responsive empathy in low-resource settings. Piloting this in both Brighton and Cape Town will allow her to adapt it for diverse contexts across Africa.
“This research is personal. I know what it means to have your worth misread in a classroom. I also know the power of being seen and supported. My work is about creating that recognition for every child, especially those navigating trauma or displacement." She said that children must be taken seriously, be recognised and that teachers can share about their own challenges and ask more questions so that children can relate to them.
The Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Higher Education Award is a turning point for her which makes it possible to collaborate with global leaders in refugee and trauma-informed education and to conduct the kind of cross-cultural fieldwork that will make her research practical and scalable.
In the short term, her findings will feed into teacher training in South Africa, working with the South African Human Rights Commission to integrate trauma-sensitive practices into national certification. In the long term, she plans to establish a Centre for Education Innovation in Cape Town, training over 500 educators annually, developing evidence-based teaching tools, and embedding radical empathy in classrooms across South Africa and beyond. She is still actively seeking additional funding to extend this project by implementing radical empathy in South African schools on a wider scale.
“I foresee this work having significant policy implications, not only for how we train future teachers, but also for how we support and teach schoolchildren. By embedding empathy at the heart of education, we can shape a system that nurtures resilience, belonging, and academic success for all learners."
Goliath said that she wants other students to know that there are opportunities and funding available out there and that students must not give up after the ninth application because like for her, success might come with perseverance.
?
