Architecture for kids podcast with Penny Hay Professor of Imagination Bath Spa University

Professor Penny Hay shares her journey from disaffected student to Professor of Imagination, exploring how reimagined learning environments can transform education for children and young people. Her pioneering projects challenge traditional educational models by creating immersive spaces where creativity, architecture, and nature converge to empower young learners.

• Art teacher saved Penny after friend's death at 16, leading to combined degree in education and fine art
• First professional experience included teaching drawing to architects and engineers
• School Without Walls project places children in residence at cultural venues for 6-7 weeks
• Forest of Imagination transforms urban spaces by bringing nature into the city
• Co-design and co-production with children central to all projects
• Creating "beautiful living classrooms" where children's ideas are valued alongside professionals
• Built environment and learning spaces critically impact how children engage with education
• Reimagining education means seeing "the child as the curriculum and the community as the school"
• Every classroom could be a studio – an immersive, multidisciplinary environment
• Child-friendly cities benefit everyone and create more sustainable futures
• Professor of Imagination role focuses on nature, wellbeing, and creative responses to global crises

Subscribe to Architecture for Kids podcast and follow us on Instagram @archforkidsCIC, Twitter @AntCapelao, and LinkedIn. Visit antoniocapelao-portfolio.co.uk, buildingcenter.co.uk, thorntoneducationtrust.org, and cardiff.ac.uk for more information.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Professor Penny Hay
• 2:15 Artistic Beginnings and Educational Journey
• 5:50 Breaking Down Silos in Learning
• 7:12 School Without Walls Project
• 9:56 Forest of Imagination Initiative
• 15:50 Living Classrooms and Immersive Environments
• 19:05 Impact on Children's Learning Experience
• 21:31 Reimagining Education and Built Environments
• 24:20 Professor of Imagination Role
• 27:12 Closing and Contact Information

Transcript

Antonio: 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast. I'm your host, antónio Cablón. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids, cic. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do to inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Welsh School of Architecture.

Antonio: 0:51

Cardiff University for Cultural and Creative Industries. Reader in Creative Teaching and Learning. Strand Leader for Creative Pedagogy, chair of Imagination Research Space, co-chair of Earth Bath Spa University and Founding Director, house of Imagination. Signature projects include School Without Walls and Forest of Imagination. Perisdopro Research focused on children learning identity as artists. She's an Honorary Fellow at Ars University, plymouth National Teaching Fellow, fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching, with awards from Action for Children's Arts, thornton Education Trust, landscape Institute and Creative Path. Penny, thank you for talking to me today and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Hey, how are yours? My first question is what subjects did you enjoy most at school and what subjects did you excel if they were different?

Penny: 1:50

I have to be completely transparent here that my art teacher saved me because in the sixth form particularly, I was a fairly disaffected student friend who died when I was 16. And I was encouraged back into the art studio on a metaphorical thread by my art teacher, who then supported my application to study art and then I ended up doing a combined degree in education, fine art and education. That's when I first arrived in Bath.

Antonio: 2:19

Tell us a little bit about the trajectory from your academic into your professional life. How did that develop?

Penny: 2:25

Studying the arts was really transformational for me and I think in those days when Bath Art Academy, as it was set up, was very much a kind of space of arts and pedagogy, so I was able to not only explore my own identity as an artist but then to really understand the process of learning and teaching and the wider context of education. So when I became a teacher I specialised then in primary and special needs education particularly, although I've taught all the way through the age groups, the age phases. But then I was particularly interested in those children that didn't want to go to school or children who were disaffected or were in those days called school refusers. I probably was, when I used to get to the school gate and turn around. So I think that's what really inspired me.

Penny: 3:16

So my second degree was in arts education and really looking at the process of learning and how then, not only creativity and imagination in the arts, but creativity and imagination in the arts, but creativity and imagination in everything, and how to engage learners in their own self-directed inquiries. So that was a really important part of my career. But interestingly, my very first job when I graduated was teaching architects and engineers drawing, because drawing was my specialism and that then got me into the whole world of architecture and the built environment and when I was a teacher locally so I worked in the southwest down Glasgow and then obviously I went to London for 10 years I'll tell you about that in a minute. But yeah, one of the first residences that I brought my children from a primary school into the Huntingdon Chapel, which is now the Bath Museum of Architecture, and we were in residence as a group working with Bureau of Haphos, structural engineers and local architectural practices, including Phil and Craig Bradley Studios, who are a key partner now in our work.

Antonio: 4:16

Your interest with working with children. Did you always have that very clear or did it as something that happened along the process that made that clear? How was that?

Penny: 4:26

I think the processes of learning and inquiry if you think about the habits of mind of an artist or the habits of mind, the dispositions of an architect or an engineer, thinking about those competencies where you're being creative, making connections, competences where you're being creative, making connections, being imaginative, being persistent in inquiries, thinking laterally, bringing in a more kind of aesthetic, artistic, embodied, immersive space for inquiry and learning. That's what I was always interested in. I don't really agree with a silos-based approach to learning, where learning is packaged and put into curricular areas and then timetabled and you only get an hour on this or an hour on that. It's very much about a space of inquiry and the strapline of our charity, which I set up when I came back to Bath, is very much around the freedom to follow your fascinations. I learned a lot from working alongside children and I learned about their particular interests. But when I was invited by Ken Baines and Christopher Hotskird to go and work in Glasgow, we literally took over the city and co-designed an exhibition alongside children and people in spaces that were galleries and museums, but in green spaces as well, and that really helped me understand that idea of working not just in a school for learning but learning everywhere. Learning is in the city as a campus for learning.

Penny: 5:47

And then I went to London.

Penny: 5:49

I worked in London for nearly 10 years at first of all, the Institute of Education and then Goldsmiths University, and the last two years at Goldsmiths I worked alongside the team at Tate Modern and helped them design the learning approach, the learning policy, and set up something called the Artist-Teacher Scheme, which was to get artists who are teachers back into their own creative practice.

Penny: 6:09

But if you replace the word artist with architect, I think it was very much about a cross-disciplinary space for learning alongside children and people. Those two years we were able to set up these experimental sites of pedagogical innovation, I like to hope, where you could witness then the young people's creativity. You could see their interests and their inquiries. They would reveal themselves through their play, through their multidisciplinary expressions of interest. And I was very taken by the practice in Reggio Emilia. So when I moved back to Bath, we've now had a 20-year relationship with colleagues in Reggio Emilia. So when I moved back to Bath, we've now had a 20-year relationship with colleagues in Reggio Emilia, really thinking about again those spaces of encounter where inquiry-based learning is much more important than the outcomes, about how co-design learning together.

Antonio: 6:57

And two of your signature projects are School Without Wall and Forest of Imagination. Do you want to show a bit more in depth of how that came to be and what was the process that you followed on those two projects?

Penny: 7:12

Yes, absolutely. The philosophy that underpins that is very much. You know, I was very lucky to work alongside Sir Ken Robinson all the way through the 90s and then, since I set up the charity, when I came back to Bath, we were called 5x5, because we set up as five artists working with five galleries and five schools, but now we work with all art forms, including architecture and design, and all spaces, including cultural centres, and all ages. So schools and settings, colleges and higher education. But I think the two signature projects that arose out of that work were very much about. Well, how do we then see the city, as I said, as a campus for learning? How do we show that learning is everywhere? How can, if you like, the child and young persons, the curriculum, and then the community is the school. I think I'm borrowing there a phrase from Professor Scott Bolt, but thinking about how we can imagine learning differently together.

Penny: 8:06

School without walls came out of a conversation with the egg theater in bath. Kate cross, the director, invited a school to be in residence in the egg. You know, let's do school at the egg. So working now our next um 12, 13th year.

Penny: 8:18

Obviously we had to pause during covid, but the idea that, together with children and people, the the first group of children were five, nine, and and then thinking about how, in residence in the theatre, for six, seven weeks at a time, they had the freedom of the city to then go to the galleries, museums, to go to the Museum of Architecture, to think about how the built and natural environment really inspired their learning. So we would always co-design a whole curriculum, not just in the arts but across everything. But we would do it together and agency and relationships were really key aspects of that project. And the children they really excelled in their learning because they were engaged, they were immersed. One of my aspirations is for every child to love learning, to want to get up in the morning, go to school. But we happened to be doing school at the Egg and we called it School Without Walls, to break down the walls between the schools and cultural centres and that idea that learning can happen not just in the school day, that it's very much a lifelong, life-wide process.

Antonio: 9:39

The title to me suggested that you could learn anywhere. We don't really need to be within a space, but any space promote learning if you engage and if you are engaged. And what about the Forest of Imagination? That's another very interesting name which is quite imaginative in itself. Do you want to talk a little bit about that project?

Penny: 9:56

Forest of Imagination is in its 11th year now. It was co-founded with Andrew Grant, who is an amazing creative genius. He designed the super trees in Singapore and Gardens by the Bay, just together with a group of creative cultural, educational partners in the city, thinking about how we can reimagine familiar spaces and bring nature and our sense of our collective imagination into a conversation together with the community. Alongside Grand Associates Phil's and Clegg Bradley Studios House of Imagination and Charity, we renamed it House of Imagination, in memory of Ken Robertson, actually, and Valspar University. So I think it's really important that we work together in a very kind of flat level way, creating these new worlds together. I think that's one of Ken's beautiful phrases around the power of the imagination. In this kind of creative, cultural, educational ecosystem, everybody has a place, and it is very much about creative placemaking and, not least, having a local, regional focus on bringing nature into an urban context, but it's also about shining a light on the importance of global forests and how, in that process, we can co-design installations with and for the community. For instance, what we're trying to do is in partnership with the university. We've turned our university into a social enterprise where we're working with the community in service to the community. Each year we take over a familiar space and reimagine it alongside our partners, so that's children and young people, but also our students and local creative cultural partners. The focus on co-design and co-production is really important for our work. First year was reimagining the historic gardens at the art school at Scion Hill and then we moved to Queen's Square, to the Abbey inside now up to Bushy, norwood Edge Arts University of Bar and back down into the city into Kingsbury Square and the river and then over to the Holborn Museum. Then COVID hit, so we reimagined Forest of Imagination as a kind of digital festival where we were able to work more internationally with partners in Berlin and Zimbabwe, and we teamed up with TED Countdown that year around the kind of action around the climate emergency. One of the key themes in Forest of Imagination is responding imaginatively to the ecological emergency and paying more attention to the importance of nature connection, but also the power of our collective imagination, as I said, to co-design these more hopeful futures together. Design and art and architecture, sustainability are key themes in our work. It's important, it's interdisciplinary. We're also very keen to collect ideas around I don't really like the word impact, but kind of social value, how we're making a difference to the communities we're working with together and how their voice and their agency is important in that process. We work with multimodal case studies where we're bringing narrative and poetic forms of evaluation as well as visual film, photography and so on, and which is again my role at the university now I've newly been appointed as Professor of Imagination, which sounds very Harry Potter, but with that role as an artist researcher, I can then work alongside the evaluation team to really show how this is making a difference to communities but also to everybody involved. So I know that Grand Associates team and the Fulton Click Bradley Studios team I mean I've just written some references for the Fulton Click Bradley Studios architect team who work with us.

Penny: 13:23

The last three years we've been back in the city. Kate Frost at the Egg invited us to reimagine a theatre. You know it was during COVID. She rang me up and said help, penny, what can we do? We've got an empty theatre. And I said well, just bring a forest inside. So we co-designed Living Tree Forest with Andrew Amundsen in Berlin who works with Anafia Eliasson's studio, and then the second iteration of that in 22 was a Living Tree Mirror mirror maze, working with Professor Alf Coles at the University of Bristol and reimagining the inside space of the theatre as this beautiful contemporary arts installation. But the attention to design and architecture was still in the conversation with the children really important where they're seeing themselves as designers, as artists, they're seeing the effect of the natural and built environment on themselves, being in the city and how that impacts on their daily lives. And Andrew Grant is very clear about the importance of how the creative environment affects our learning. And what I've tried to do over the years is show how we can make creativity visible, show how every classroom is a work of art, as Joseph Boyce would say, and thinking about that, more sensorial, experimental learning where it's embodied and aesthetic that you can see the creativity, you make it visible, as I say. So then this last year we were invited to take over the historic assembly rooms in Bath and that was a month. It was mad and complex. It's where I broke my arm in the BFIT.

Penny: 14:54

Then Beautiful installation that Underground designed, but each of the spaces inside we can think on behalf of nature. And then moving through the spaces into a dark forest designed by Matthew Lees who, interestingly, was a design student 10 years ago and still working with us, matthew Lees, who, interestingly, was a design student 10 years ago and still working with us. So bringing dead box hedge into the space but illuminating it with this beautiful purple lighting. And then Andrew Amundsen worked with Fields and Clegg Bradley Studios. So the team of architects working with Marcus Rostny and Michael Lewis, luke McNabb, alongside Andrew Amundsen and the team, to bring a thousand grasses into the Grand Ballroom and to reimagine that space it was entitled Wandering Ways, but really that kind of space of walking through nature, with this kind of sensory experience of not only the smell and the light but the sound. We were able to design a sound system based on. We're using Cosmo Sheldrake's the Last Call, the birdsong that's been threatened with extinction over the last eight years or so.

Penny: 16:14

And I think for me that was a really important moment because when children then entered the space and they were able to witness that unique classroom, that they were given permission to follow their fascination, have that space in self-directed inquiry where their ideas were as valuable as the ideas that the architects and the artists had been discussing during that process, I think that for me was a moment of yeah, this is brilliant, it is a beautiful living classroom and I think, in the same way, you know, ask the Living Tree but also Underground Design, this amazing Beaver's Den, as I mentioned, mentioned, but working with pierce taylor, the architect, and having a space that was then animated by a soundscape with kathy heinz beautiful deep water, listening, using hydrophones and having the sounds and the sensations of the beavers there was a vr experience and wonderful kind of construction that brought in not only a life-size beach that you could get inside but also this reflective river space that, well, I'd spent a long time experiencing myself, as I said. And then we also had outside, piers Taylor designed a forest canopy with the architecture students from Reading University, which was a temporary community kitchen from Reading University, which was a temporary community kitchen. So it was a beautiful architectural structure, working with a group of wood magicians, including Charlie Brentnell, and thinking about how that space was used by the community kitchen, community garden partners. So that was Demousse Cookery School, jamie's Farm and Bath of Occam's, refugees Food Cycle, all of the three SG groups in the city working together to then provide food at weekends for the community.

Penny: 17:51

And I think for me the whole event was very immersive. We gave over the card room as a documentation room. So we were able to really think about the space that was documented, the learning that was documented and sharing that immediately as much as we could, working with colleagues from the Royal College of Art. And then Andrew's team curated the tea room of the tree room, which was local partners so Barscape, rainforest and CERN, national Trust, grant, socios, and we also had a 10-year exhibition, if you like, of what we had also been involved in over the 10 years with Forest of Imagination. So it was a really lovely space that the public and schools enjoyed. Early years settings families were able to visit over the month. I think we had about 11,000 visitors over the month but it was an open space of inquiry and that was really important to all of us really.

Antonio: 18:42

How would you define the experience that the children and young people that experience your classrooms and these learning spaces? What do they get out of these?

Penny: 18:54

I suppose value isn't it for the children and young people to see themselves as learners, that they understand the learning process, the process of inquiry, that these spaces are spaces of encounter, spaces of possibility. They're empowering spaces where children and young people's ideas are valued alongside role models like architects and designers, landscape architects and artists, and I think that notion of you know. How do we then inspire future generations? How do we encourage those creative pathways all the way through life, you know, from the early years, all the way through school, but into college and higher education, if children and young people choose that pathway to make this their profession, I think in a way it's about reimagining education so everybody can play a part in it, and I think that conversation with parents is also really important. So hence, make these processes visible and in the end, we want to impact policy development. I co-authored the Impact Case Study for Creative Pedagogies, which lent on our ways of working with forests of imagination and school that walls as examples of reimagining learning, reimagining education.

Penny: 20:04

I'm a big fan of Nora Bateson's work where she talks about everything's connected and we learn like a forest, we learn in that kind of transcontextual mutuality, but I think, learning like an ocean learning, I should say.

Penny: 20:15

But I think learning like an ocean, learning like a meadow, and I think that's where we can then think about how social value and social trust, where everybody feels welcome and part of that process, that they belong in that process. I think that's really important to me. So, from children's point of view, young people's point of view, whether they're aspiring to be architects or not, it's that sense of purposeful discovery and that we're discovering, learning together and the adults are the companions in the young people's learning. It's a space of free and open inquiry and expression, but it's very much a community practice, community belonging, and one of our mantras in the forest is everybody's welcome, caring. It's a space of compassion and creativity and imagination and collaboration and teamwork and problem solving and critical thinking. I think those dispositions, as I said earlier, are really important and across disciplines, in the end it's about changing lives through this public pedagogy.

Antonio: 21:13

And an inspiration for learning, regardless of the discipline or the subject, which is quite important. These learning spaces have a direct repercussion or relationships with the built environment. How would that impact the built environment?

Penny: 21:27

What we're trying to do together is reimagine learning. Reimagine education and how it might be different in the future. So taking the idea that the child is the curriculum and the community is the school. I think seeing things differently, where everybody's participating, everybody's invited, it's a democratic process, where it's very much like a reimagining something together. We're not delivering a package set of learning materials somebody else has designed somewhere else. It's about engaging everybody in that process.

Penny: 21:59

I think the built environment, the spaces of learning, are so important. Reimagining every schoolbury, university and the forest team. Looking at the notion of a playful green planet how can we co-design mini forests of imagination and mini Edens everywhere, inside and out, taking over meanwhile spaces, but also in brownfield sites, or bringing the green into an urban context. The conversations with our teams of architects and designers and landscape architects has been very much about being brave and being courageous, about almost creatively disrupting the norm, and I think we are in a situation at the moment where, not just in the UK context but I think globally, we really do need to reimagine learning. We need to think about how every child and young person has a right to beautiful learning, to learning that is really about intrinsic motivation, rather than this marketised, test-based, assessment-based culture that is far removed from the process of child development and young people's development. And I think the relationship between the natural and the built environment in this context is really important.

Penny: 23:19

Imagining cities being different, imagining children in these beautiful, child-friendly cities. Well, if a city is child-friendly, it's friendly for everyone, and I think that's where it's about these really generative, sustainable futures. You know I'm very impressed with the work in Wales around the Future Generations Act and I think that notion that we now have a group of young, really generative, sustainable futures. You know I'm very impressed with the work in Wales around the Future Generations Act and I think that notion that we now have a group of young green curators in the forest of imagination where they're thinking about the best kind of spaces to learn in. I remember years ago with Charlie Ledbetter thinking about the Building Schools of the Future programme and maybe we've got stuck in certain ways of thinking about these institutions for learning, but actually maybe every classroom should be a studio, maybe we should have every classroom as an immersive environment that, as I say, is multidisciplinary and invites these different inquiries, so almost like a university setting.

Antonio: 24:11

I would like to talk a little bit about your new role as a professor of imagination. What does that entail?

Penny: 24:18

Yeah, so I think it links to your previous point. I think we're working on these concepts of what is learning, what is teaching, how can we teach creatively, how can we learn imaginatively? I think my new role as professor of imagination is really devoted, as an artist, researcher, to these spaces of inquiry. How we then set up these experimental sites of learning alongside the community of all ages and, as you say, in response to real world questions. So, working with role models in the city as a city of imagination, for example, I think what I would like to see is that you know children and people through early years, through school, working alongside our staff and students at the university, working together on shared inquiries where they all take a part in a co-inquiry and bring their own expertise to that space. I think that's where that kind of model of studio-based learning and immersive learning is really important.

Penny: 25:16

In my professorial role, I am devoting my time to imagination and creativity and the arts, but also particularly around the relationship between nature and wellbeing, increasingly what we're seeing in response to the many crises, not least the war and the ecological emergency. But I think this is a time to really think radically about doing things differently and I think that what we have the opportunity to do here as a university, but working with all our creative, cultural, educational partners in this beautiful, creative ecosystem, is to show what's possible and to manifest that daily. Our aspiration as a university is to really think about our students and staff being curious and being creative and confident, but working alongside the community to explore these areas of possibility, these spaces of possibility.

Antonio: 26:07

That curiosity should start happening much earlier age, which I don't think it happens with the current national curriculums. We have, particularly in England, more than Wales nature and well-being at the heart and particularly for our future generations to be inspired.

Antonio: 26:42

Thank you very much to my guests today, to all the listeners, and please subscribe to Architecture for Kids podcast and leave your rating and the review. Recommend us to your friends and family and leave your rating and a review. Recommend us to your friends and family and to find out more about it, visit our websites antoniocaplao-portfoliocouk, buildingcentercouk, thorntoneducationtrustorg, cardiffacuk, and follow us on Instagram, archforkids CIC, twitter, ant Kaplaun, linkedin, ant Kaplaun, c-a-p-e-l-a-o. And please join me again next week for another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast, brought to you in collaboration with the Build Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Welsh School of Architecture, cardiff University.