“Growing up in a gang-ridden neighbourhood in Cape Town, you come to assume that children are problems to manage rather than humans with potential. Being labelled as ‘troubled’ or having teachers pity you… is a reality that many children face.”
In this powerful blog post, doctoral researcher Le-Anne Goliath explains Radical Empathy:
When we talk about empathy in education, we often mean compassion, patience, or the ability to ‘understand where a child is coming from’. These are valuable qualities, but they can sometimes slide into what I call ‘soft empathy’: the well-meaning impulse to lower expectations for children who have faced trauma or hardship.
Radical empathy is different. It is the process by which adults learn to take children seriously. It means recognizing that every child has the right to dream, and then holding them responsible, with our support, for striving toward those dreams.
This type of empathy is a foundation-stone for building quality relationships in the educational environment.
Relationships matter in every life moment and RbE reaches to and beyond this important UK government-supported project.