From Pockets of Hope to Conditions for Change 

29 September 2026

As part of our Leading with Purpose Reflections series, Joanne Calladine-Evans and Robert Legg have written this piece in response to the essay by Dr Chrissie Tiller: Spaces of Possibility and Pockets of Hope. It forms part of a wider conversation within A New Direction’s Leading with Purpose: Cultural Education in Practice Programme - a series of publications, conversations and events exploring the future of leadership in cultural education.

Dr Chrissie Tiller’s Spaces of Possibility and Pockets of Hope makes a simple but urgent argument: cultural education is not an optional extra. At a time when young people are navigating increasingly complex social, environmental and political challenges, cultural learning is central to how they understand themselves, each other and the world they are inheriting. Dr Tiller challenges us to think about hope not as something we feel, but as something we cultivate through practice. Hope is practical, disciplined and collective. It is forged through the spaces we create, the questions we ask, the voices we privilege and the forms of knowledge we are willing to recognise.

The challenge for educational leaders is rarely a lack of purpose. More often, it is sustaining that purpose within systems that can narrow what feels possible. Time, accountability, funding, policy shifts and institutional habits all shape what is noticed, valued and protected. Dr Tiller’s article speaks directly to this reality. Drawing on theory from John Dewey, Paulo Freire, bell hooks and others, it reminds us that pedagogy is never simply a matter of method. It is about relationship, power, meaning and agency – and the conditions that enable people to imagine and create new possibilities.

The idea of “spaces of possibility” is a powerful one. In education, opportunities are often discussed as though access alone is enough. Yet access to what, on whose terms, and with whose culture at the centre? A young person may be invited into a gallery, theatre, classroom or programme and still feel unseen within it. Dr Tiller’s emphasis on lived experience, community, dialogue and representation challenges educators to think beyond participation and towards belonging: not simply opening doors, but creating spaces in which young people can recognise themselves and be recognised by others.

This shift in thinking matters deeply for cultural education. Cultural experiences that feel disconnected from young people’s lives can inadvertently reinforce the hierarchies they are intended to challenge. Cultural education should widen horizons without positioning some forms of culture as more valuable than others. Its transformative potential lies in helping young people recognise their homes, streets, languages, music, stories, rituals and local places as rich cultural resources. From that starting point, engagement with new forms, traditions and institutions becomes an act of exchange rather than assimilation. Young people are recognised not as recipients of culture, but as active creators of meaning with knowledge, perspectives and experiences that matter.

Dr Tiller’s discussion of Freire highlights a tension that sits at the heart of both leadership development and cultural education. The desire to carefully design learning brings with it the risk of overdesign: specifying the content, directing the discussion and determining the intended outcomes so thoroughly that little space remains for participants to influence the learning themselves. Structure has an important role to play, but agency cannot flourish in spaces where every question has already been answered. Participants – including young people – need opportunities to pose the problems that matter to them and to guide the direction of inquiry. This demands a form of leadership that is purposeful without being controlling, knowledgeable without being closed, and secure enough to share authority.

Dr Tiller’s engagement with bell hooks reminds us that care, love and community are not peripheral concerns; they are the prerequisites of meaningful learning. These concepts can sit uneasily within professional and institutional language because they resist simple metrics and measurement. Yet they are often what makes risk, honesty and imagination possible. People think more critically, speak more openly and create more boldly when they feel respected and valued. This is not a soft alternative to rigour. It is the foundation on which rigour depends. Without trust, dialogue becomes performance. Without care, participation becomes extraction. Without community, hope becomes an individual burden rather than a collective endeavour.

Dr Tiller invites a broader understanding of leadership in cultural education. Leadership is not only about programmes, resources or moments of inspiration, however valuable these may be. It is fundamentally about building the conditions in which young people’s voices, cultures and imaginations can influence decisions, relationships and futures. Some of those conditions are visible: time, space, funding, partnerships and curriculum. Others are less visible but equally important: trust, humility, listening, courage and a readiness to challenge assumptions about whose knowledge counts.

Dr Tiller’s article suggests that hope begins in small, intentional acts: listening differently, arranging spaces differently, valuing different stories, connecting learning to lived realities and making room for imagination. Yet these acts point towards a larger responsibility. Cultural education should not simply offer young people temporary pockets of hope within an unchanged system. At its best, it should equip them with the confidence, agency and collective power to imagine, shape and transform the world – and their place within it.

Creating pockets of hope

Creating genuine pockets of hope requires more than opening the doors to existing cultural spaces. It requires a willingness to allow cultural spaces to be reshaped by the young people who enter them. We encourage cultural educators to reflect on the following questions:

• Are young people being invited to participate in culture as it is currently defined, or to help redefine it?

• Are they being asked to answer our questions, or are we prepared for their questions to challenge our assumptions, priorities and ways of working?

By Joanne Calladine-Evans and Robert Legg - June 2026

About the authors

Joanne Calladine-Evans is a Programme Leader in the University College London (UCL) Centre for Educational Leadership at Institute of Education (IOE), UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, where she designs and leads UK and international leadership development programmes. Her work focuses on professional learning, leadership development, practitioner inquiry and translating research evidence into practice across diverse educational contexts.

Before joining UCL, Joanne spent more than 25 years as a teacher and senior leader in schools. Joanne is also a Director of the Board of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill and currently undertaking a Doctorate in Education at UCL, exploring leadership identity and the development of sustainable and culturally responsive leadership.

Dr Robert Legg is Programme Leader for Teacher Development at UCL IOE. He is an experienced teacher and school leader whose career since 2001 has spanned schools and universities across the UK, New Zealand and France. Rob’s award-winning academic writing on themes in arts education and cultural learning is published in journals such as Music Education Research, Research in Education, Psychology of Music and The Curriculum Journal while his book chapters, journalism, classroom materials and reviews can be found in many professional publications. The focus of Rob’s work at UCL is the university’s DfE-funded Early Career Teacher Programme.

Leading with Purpose: Cultural Education in Practice is a free resource for cultural educators that includes a collection of observations, studies, analysis and practical tools. It can be accessed and downloaded for free from A New Direction’s website here.