How to Enter a Forest of Imagination with Dr Penny Hay

Imagine you stand in front of the house of trust, you're about to take a walk in a forest. This is your school now, the air freshens your nostrils, the moss is your trusted companion. Welcome. My name is Sevan, and I'll be your host and your thinking partner today on the show. This is for people who love to ignite social and environmental change and are curious about ways to navigate turbulences tensions and get out of relational numbness when he shows up. And with me today I have Dr. Penny Hay, penny Tan's, spaces of possibility. She believes that everyone's an artist. She invites imagination, creativity, and the arts to sit at the heart of a transdisciplinary practise. She opens room for freedom and wonder and shared invention on top of being an artist. She's also an educator and researcher at Baths by University. She's a professor of imagination in the research centre for cultural and creative industry. Her signature projects, School Without Walls and Forest of Imagination are living laboratories of pedagog, where learning spills beyond the classroom and learner's agency becomes the central curriculum. So shall we go into the forest, close your eyes, draw, take notes as you listen to us, doodle with twigs and soil, or do whatever makes you sparkle. Here we go.

Welcome to the House of Trust, penny.

Oh, it's lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Well, I'm excited to have you here and do one of our conversations, but in public this time and for some reason it makes me nervous.

Well, it's funny because I feel as though I've known you forever.

Yeah, that's wonderful. So what animates you, penny?

Well, that was an extraordinary introduction, and I think for me it's about that invitation wherever you are in the time of your life, whether you're a young person or an elder, but thinking about that invitation to play, to be imaginative, to have that imaginative freedom, to explore your ideas and thoughts and feelings through the arts alongside other people. So I think the power of creativity and imagination are absolutely life wide and lifelong. And I suppose what we need to show is that how we can manifest those daily, how everybody is creative, everybody is an artist, and how that we can share those kind of processes and inquiries together.

What is this state of mind and state of belief and way of seeing the world? Where is that stemming from for you?

I suppose it's where you started, isn't it? It's the metaphor of the forest, and forest of imagination in particular invites us to think differently, invites us to dream in the forest, to think about our ecological empathy, our ecological imagination, and our collective imagination in that context. Not only in the face of the climate, ecological emergences, but also thinking about how we show up in the world, how we are together in the world, and how we can explore not only our own learning, but also the kind of social action that we might take to make this world a better place to imagine more hopeful futures. To think about the concept of world making. So I often use what's Nora Bateson's phrase. Actually, we learn like a forest, we learn like a meadow or an ocean. Everything's connected. She says we learn in transcon contextual mutuality. But if you translate that into kind of everyday thinking and feeling, it's how everything is connected in this beautiful entangled space like a forest.

I've got images of a forest, but I first lived in the forest when I was six. It was on a camp. They sent us to camps in France back in the early eighties. And it was not a scout camp, but almost. So we were intenses and we were tiny little people, intense. And it was raining, of course it was in Brittany. And we built these kind of bathroom table with twigs and branches, and of course there was a multifunctional table and we got lost in the forest. And I can't remember any adults chaperoning us in the forest either. So that sense of freedom stayed with me all the time. And what I also remember is these funky close combination that had decided to arrange for myself when I was just left my own devices. Do you have any story of the forest for you, penny or maybe an earlier story of forest?

I think even as a young child, I would disappear into the fields in the forest to play and kind of lose myself in that sense of kind of wonder or with nature in nature. So I was lucky in that sense, but I think that's kind of stayed with me. In fact, the co-founder of Forest of Imagination is Andrew Grant, and he also talks about how this kind of life, lifelong creativity stays with you with the inspiration of nature through your childhood. And I found a beautiful poem that I had like to share with you because it really does sum up when you find a poem or a phrase or a quote that really resonates with you. And it's from an ancient text by Franz block around the philosophy of music. But actually what he says is we walk in the forest and feel we are or might be what the forest is dreaming. And for me, that is such a beautiful invitation to think differently about when we walk in nature, but when we also, we go through those portals in our imagination to go to these new spaces of possibility and think about how we are being and thinking and acting and knowing and sharing together.

So yes, back to the phrase I used earlier around how we show up in the world, how we can be alongside each other in that space of dialogue for thinking about imagining greener fairer societies. Greener fairer cities. A transformational moment for me was when I was in the sixth form, I went to a state grammar school, turned into a comprehensive, and I was a fairly disaffected student. My friend had died in the lower sixth form and I didn't really want to go to school. I got to the school gates and turned around and went to draw in the park. But actually what my art teacher did was draw me back in on a metaphorical thread and invite me back into that idea that I could be an artist, that I could go to art school, that I could in the end train to be a teacher and specialise in arts education. And so I'm forever deeply grateful to him for recognising that in me. And I think I have done the same for other children. I've always worked with children on the edge, invisible children, children in underserved communities, to invite them into this space where they have that confidence to express themselves and that their ideas are valued.

Well, beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you. I wonder what companion or muses outside the trees themselves, maybe will it tilted the way you see the world? I remember you asked me that question about muses. So can I ask it back?

Yes, you can. Muses and moons probably. Is that right?

Yeah, moons. Yeah, I said moons because they've got two sides. Yeah,

Absolutely. I have so many, I'm so lucky to have so many people that have really inspired not only my practise as an artist, but also as a researcher, as an educator, also as a mother. And I think that, well, coming back to Nora Bateson, her father, Gregory Bateson wrote the most brilliant book, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind". And as a young art student and then going forwards, I trained in fine art and education and then really specialise in particularly working with children, young people who didn't want to go to school. So to think of the education system as a whole creative ecosystem, to think about how our ideas grow and how we share ideas. So rather than having a set curriculum, I would invite, what's your interest? What's your inquiries? Who would you like to work with? What do you need? And I think that that's the point where I met Sir Ken Robinson very early on in my career.

Wow. So lots of living and people who've transitioned who inspire you on a day-to-day basis and the people you work with and the people who maybe walk in the forest in that forest as well and surprise us by what they say, what they live through. You often say that imagination can change not just how children learn, but how communities live together. So if we treat that imagination as a moss, an essential soil for a flourishing society, what responsibilities does it open us? Does it open for each of us listening today, especially in these awkward times?

Yes, absolutely. And that's why children's imagination is so powerful. They naturally inhabit those spaces of possibility. So nurturing those particular habits of mind all the way through our lives is really important. And we work with children, young people, but we also, we open up the forest of imagination as an intergenerational space where everyone is welcome, it's free, it's for everyone. And so not just working alongside artists and landscape architects, but we work alongside scientists, environmentalists. We now have lots of different live projects with our students at Bath Spa University. So last autumn, the architecture students were in residence for 10 days with a live project that they were co-designing a brief around regenerative thinking. So thinking about designing with the planet in mind, that's a phrase from underground as well.

And he said famously, once children see themselves as authors and inventors, then their motivations and interests explode. And I would add in those phrases and artists and mathematicians and so on, we work alongside an amazing professor of Coles who has done a lot of work around space between maths and creativity as well. And coming back to those dispositions, those qualities, those habits of mind, of being imaginative, being persistent and curious in our learning, making connections, asking questions, and having the trust that you don't have to know the answers immediately. That base of not knowing is so important because then you get a genuine inquiry.

So there is that. It's not a tension, but that cohabitation of authoring, creating and also being at ease with not knowing, that's what I'm hearing from you, is that

Yes, and the concept of uncertainty. There's a brilliant book is probably behind me in my

Book. Penny always flashes a book and I've got lots of screenshot of her flashing a book every time this book, which I keep preciously, and there she goes, rummaging in a bookshelf, just as a caption for that. What have you got for us now?

The beautiful book, I've just lent it to a student, but a beautiful book called Embracing Uncertainty by Margaret Heffernan. So Margaret is a professor of practise at the University of Bath. So our two universities work together, and Margaret's book is about that whole idea about how writers and musicians and artists can hold that space of uncertainty and risk and not knowing and keep those habits of mind live in their own practise. Last year we worked on a project with Claire Hughes and Mike Bond with our students, our graduates from both universities working together across arts graduates and business management graduates. And together they co-designed a multimodal exhibition for Margaret's book launch. But there was a lot of risk, a lot of uncertainty, and understanding those qualities and how we can trust the process of inquiry was absolutely vital to the success. I'll find it for you another day.

Cool. We'll add it to the notes as we say. So being at ease with uncertainty, offering, creating, asking questions. That leads me to the next question. I'm in love with all these things around imagination, but I've noticed something as well. When we prescribe imagination, let's do a workshop about imagination at the end, at the end of some of these sessions, sometimes you end up with more of the same. The whole imagination work collapsed back into existing habits of perception that it falls a little bit flat. So how do we nourish the way we perceive, we participate and we learn and we imagine across context together. How do we do that without falling back into the same way to look at things the same way to refer to things?

I think it's being immersed in those spaces of possibility and trusting that process of inquiry through interdisciplinary transdisciplinary expression. So in Elia, as I mentioned, they talk about hundred languages of expression and a hundred more. So I suppose one of the restrictions on a SEC curriculum with siloed subjects is counter to that. So I would open up a space of inquiry through questions and ideally questions that come from the learner and then the group of learners together. I have found Margaret embracing Uncertainty, wanted to read the beginning of her chapter four, which is called Prepared Minds. Let's go. It sums up an answer to your question. So she says, curiosity, patience, courage, an eye for detail, stamina, minds open and alert to alternatives, a love of discovery, the ability to live with paradox. And I think that really is almost like a mantra. So one of the activities I do with my students who are thinking about how they can design a more creative pedagogical approach alongside their learners in their care.

And so one of the activities I invite is around co-designing a kind of manifesto. What kind of educator do you want to be? What kind of ethos would you like to create in your learning spaces? I lean on the phrases from Joseph Boyce. I was lucky to work at Tate Modern before I opened on their learning policy, but thinking about every classroom should be a work of art, of course. And then there's a wonderful researcher called Harriet Hans who shared with me her rules for researching. And she says these 10 things. She says, make practises not outcomes. Don't get in the way. Keep everything in play. Resist the urge to rehearse. Use soft eyes, beautiful, fall off edges, make space for the unexpected. Stir things up. Stay between and be brave. So if you came up with your own ways of researching for inquiring, for being an artist, for being a scientist, what would they be? And how can you then make those values really transparent in your practise? So that kind of beautiful contagion for how we can work together to think together through those inquiries, those possibilities.

Oh, powerful. So imagine there are many people listening to the House of Trust podcast they're working for towards social environmental change, that vast topic, they do that in size system that they qualify as sometimes rigid and they're time poor. Imagine they just heard your invitation to create their own manifesto. What would be the nudge or the encouragement that you could give them to start that without waiting for perfect conditions?

Yeah, so that's an interesting question. I think it is in the end, it's about values, isn't it? It's how you want to make these values visible through your daily practise so that you show up in a very authentic way that one of my friends Andrew Bruton talks about there is no subject to hide behind with art. We are in the world and we are looking to the horizon. And I think that's a lovely way of inviting. So some of my clear values are around, well, your house of trust. Trust and respect are absolutely key that we invite that idea of unconditional positive regard for everyone. We are finding ways to invite everybody to be a learner in that space, to be an artist, to express their ideas, to work through struggle and difficulty, to find joy and failure, to not be worried about rehearsing Iris, Vander Twin in your track talks about show your messy working.

It's brilliant to try things out together in this space of unknowing. And I think in the end it comes back to what I referred to earlier on around the inner development goals, if you like. The way that we're thinking about being and thinking and relating, collaborating, acting, playing together is then we're constantly learning. And that comes back to that, not only that lifelong life wide, but it also helps us find those moments of plural identities. One of the artists we work with says, the arts allow us to try out different versions of ourselves. When I was doing my PhD, I worked alongside the same group of children actually for five years,

Looking for another book in the shelf.

I'm looking for the book that became my monograph, which is called Children Are Artists Supporting Children's Learning Identity as Artists. And it was about being alongside those children to understand their fascinations, to allow them to follow their fascinations and to then see themselves as artists to explore their different learning identities. So that was a really important moment in my career. And also the charity I mentioned earlier, house of Imagination, I set that up originally it was five by five, but I came back to Bath after leaving Goldsmiths and Tate Modern, came back to Bath to have my child who's now 25. But she took me on that journey. I joined her in her journey as a companion in her learning, but also thinking about how children find that intrinsic motivation to then have agency in their own learning. And then the transferable characteristics of, well, what I did was distil a set of pedagogical characteristics to then think how do we then work alongside each other in learning? So although I'd focused on children, then those capacities and qualities and dispositions are quite transferable across different age groups. And especially we found in last year's forest imagination, the agency and the kind of dynamic relationships of the adults working in that intergenerational space with children, everybody was learning together. So there wasn't a hierarchy, genuine kind of passion for finding out together.

So I'm hearing companionship, walking alongside each other, no silo, no hierarchy, a lot of presence and being in the moment and observing, looking, noticing in all what you said really. So Penny, as we slowly coming out of our forest walk with our muddy boots, what more do you think or feel or want to say?

I think just the word that comes to mind immediately is to pay attention and to be sensitive to sensitise in the forest. It's beautiful. It's an invitation for learning.

Well, thank you for spending these moments in the House of Trust and Surroundings today, Penny,

It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Servane.

Well, thank you all for listening today. This was Dr. Penny Hay and a beautiful forest of imagination and creativity and attention for us today. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to look at other episodes of the House of Trust podcast and they're all wherever the podcast are, they're all there. And I'll see you very soon. Bye bye.