In this professorial lecture, Professor Penny Hay will explore spaces of possibility with the city as a campus for learning alongside young people, artists, educators and creative professionals. Signature projects include ‘School Without Walls’ and ‘Forest of Imagination’, experimental sites of pedagogical research and innovation with learners’ agency at the centre. In this partnership work, the creative methodology ‘everyone an artist’ places imagination, creativity and the arts at the heart of a transdisciplinary pedagogy that optimises freedom and imagination.

Penny Hay is Professor of Imagination and Reader in Creative Teaching and Learning at Bath Spa University. Penny is an artist, educator and researcher, and Founding Director of House of Imagination. Her doctoral research focused on children’s learning identity as artists, and she has worked internationally on arts education research projects. Penny is the strand leader for Creative Pedagogy in the Policy, Pedagogy and Practice Research Centre, and co-chairs the eARTh research group. Penny was awarded an Honorary Fellowship at Arts University Plymouth and a Fellowship in Imagination at the Centre for Future Thinking; she is a National Teaching Fellow and Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching.