In addition to inviting community members to harvest dried Japanese Knotweed stalks with us for the Polo Lake structure—and to join us in planting the wetland itself—the floating wetland also became a living classroom. The Floating Wetland summer school—initiated and led by collective member Holly Ewald with the New Urban Arts Knights Summer Program—used the wetland as a catalyst for eight Central High School students and their artist-educators to explore the natural world.

Over six weeks, this trilingual group deepened their relationships with plants, insects, fungi, water, and microbes through weekly sessions at Central High School and Roger Williams Park with teaching artists Jules Zuckerberg and Vic Xu. Students began by copying illustrations from Pond Life and soon grew confident drawing directly from observation. Translation apps, multilingual worksheets, and collaborative journals helped support shared inquiry and connection.

Their learning expanded through the Park’s education tools: sketching in the Museum of Natural History’s Wildlife Room, studying lake microbes with microscopes and a dissecting scope provided by The Nature Conservancy, and working with author Kate Schapira to imagine the pond from multiple organisms’ perspectives. With guidance from Jeffrey Yoo Warren and the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research, students collected water samples using “Baby Legs” and viewed the microbial world through DIY microscopes—watching organisms dart and swirl across laptop screens.

For the final class, students created collaborative “Musical Journals,” responding to each other’s drawings in eight-panel booklets. Each left with a small collection of peer-generated drawings—a memento of a summer spent learning with the human and nonhuman world.

From this shared process, their collective zine, Exquisite Wetland, was born.

Alongside the summer school, collective member Alexandra Ionescu designed an educational sign and collaborated with local artist Jasmine Gubrod on an illustration that shows how the floating wetland supports nutrient-impaired water through plant and microbial nutrient cycling—and invites curiosity about the life happening just below the surface.