Blooming Together: when children, art, and pollinators tell the same story

TOGETHER FOR BEES  ❖  ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Blooming Together: when children, art, and pollinators tell the same story

A community-engaged art education project rooted in Arkansas ecology — and a love letter to the wild bee

Dr. Aslı Kinsizer  |  University of Central Arkansas  |  June 2026

What does a wildbee have to do with belonging? More than we might think. When I arrived in Conway, Arkansas as a first-year international faculty member, I was a newcomer to the landscape, the culture, and the classroom. I did not yet know the names of the wildflowers blooming along the campus paths, or which insects visited them. But I knew that the natural world had always been a place of orientation for me — a space where I could find stillness, meaning, and connection across difference.

That instinct became the foundation of Butterflies, Blooms, and Belonging — a four-week community-engaged art workshop I designed during the Spring 2026 semester at the University of Central Arkansas, supported by a UCA Foundation Grant. Twelve preservice art education students and approximately twenty children (kindergarten through seventh grade) came together in a shared studio space, using Arkansas’s native ecosystems — its butterflies, beetles, wildflowers, and wild bees — as the conceptual and material heart of the work (Kinsizer, 2026).

A bee at the center of everything

My artwork Entangled Bloom: A Wild Bee’s World was born from the same conviction that animated the classroom project: that pollinators are not peripheral to human life, but entangled within it. The piece places a wild bee at the center of a circular composition — surrounded by pressed wildflowers, natural pollen clusters, and fragments of honeycomb. Every element was gathered, preserved, and placed intentionally. Nothing is decorative. Everything belongs.

The circle is not accidental. In ecology, the relationships between pollinators and flowering plants form closed loops of dependency — the bee needs the bloom; the bloom needs the bee. Remove one, and the entire network begins to unravel. Scientists estimate that wild bees contribute to the pollination of approximately 80% of flowering plant species globally, and that one in three bites of food humans eat depends on pollinator activity (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2018). Yet wild bee populations are declining sharply — driven by habitat loss, pesticide exposure, climate disruption, and the monocultures that have replaced the diverse flowering landscapes they depend on.

Art, I believe, is one of the most powerful tools we have for making these invisible relationships visible — and for making people care enough to protect them.

Children as co-researchers of the living world

In the classroom workshop, blooming became the organizing metaphor — not only for the ecological content, but for the pedagogical experience itself. Drawing on phenomenological theory (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) and dialogical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), the project was designed so that children did not simply learn about pollinators; they encountered them. They held pressed wildflowers, examined beetle specimens, painted bees, and pressed their observations into handmade eco-journals assembled from fallen magnolia leaves gathered on campus walks.

The eco-journals — sewn by hand from leaves collected by preservice teachers — became living artifacts of place. Each child wrote and drew inside them across four sessions. One child inscribed on a magnolia leaf: “We grow & change like butterflies… we don’t look the same.” Another wrote simply: “I love beetles!” These were not just sweet sentiments. They were evidence of ecological attention — of children beginning to notice, name, and care about the living world around them.

This is precisely the kind of awareness that pollinator conservation requires. Wild bees do not suffer from a lack of scientific data. They suffer from a lack of public imagination — from a culture in which their presence goes unnoticed, and their loss goes unmourned. When a child learns to look carefully at a bee, to understand what it is doing and why it matters, something shifts in how that child will move through the world. Art education, at its best, is how that shift happens (Freedman, 2003).

In Conway and across the Arkansas River Valley, this awareness has a vivid cast of characters. Arkansas is home to an estimated 400–650 species of native bees — one of the richest pollinator communities in the American South. Walking the University of Central Arkansas campus in spring, you are likely to encounter the brown-belted bumblebee (Bombus griseocollis) foraging on magnolia blossoms, or the tiny metallic-green sweat bee (family Halictidae) glittering like a living jewel on a purple coneflower. The eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) — Arkansas’s most recognizable butterfly — drifts through in yellow and black, while sphinx moths hover at dusk over native milkweed and black-eyed Susans. These are the pollinators the children in the workshop were, in their own way, learning to see. When a child draws a bee on a magnolia leaf and writes “forest!” beside a tiny hand-painted mushroom, they are beginning to participate in the same network of attention that conservation depends on.

From Arkansas to the world: the illustration that connects

The digital illustration I am contributing to the Great Exhibition of Bees 2026 extends the same philosophy into a different visual register. Here, the wild bee is joyful, playful, and enormous-eyed — carrying a world map as a wing, its body warm with amber and brown tones that echo real bee coloration. The image is intentionally accessible: it speaks to children and adults alike, across languages and cultural contexts.

The world-map wing is the heart of the piece. It asks a simple but urgent question: what kind of world do we want to live in? A world in which the bee is still present — still foraging, still pollinating, still connecting the living networks that feed us all? The bee does not belong to one country or one ecosystem. It belongs to the entangled whole. And so, in a way, do we.

This is why I am grateful to be part of the Together for Bees initiative, which since 2020 has brought together over 150 artists from around the world to draw public attention to wild bees and biodiversity. Art changes what people pay attention to. And what people pay attention to, they begin to protect.

Why this matters — urgently

We are living through what scientists have called the sixth mass extinction — a period of biodiversity loss so rapid and widespread that it is reshaping the ecological systems humans depend on. Wild bees are among the most visible, and most documented, casualties. The 2026 updated IUCN Red List has brought renewed urgency to the situation, confirming that wild bee populations across Europe and beyond continue to decline. Habitat destruction, pesticide use, climate disruption, and the loss of floral diversity are all implicated.

But the crisis is not only ecological. It is also one of attention and imagination. Children growing up in urban and suburban environments increasingly encounter nature through screens rather than through direct sensory experience. They may never observe a wild bee foraging. They may have no felt relationship with the living systems that sustain them. This is not a trivial problem. Research in environmental education consistently shows that emotional connection to the natural world — formed in childhood — is one of the strongest predictors of pro-environmental behavior in adulthood (Gay, 2018; Lai, 2012).

Community-engaged art education projects like Butterflies, Blooms, and Belonging offer one response to this challenge. By bringing children into direct, sensory, creative contact with native ecosystems — and by centering pollinators as subjects worthy of attention, curiosity, and care — such projects can cultivate the ecological imagination that conservation ultimately requires. Art education and biodiversity advocacy are not separate concerns. They are the same project, approached from different angles.

An invitation to bloom

The magnolia leaves that became eco-journals. The wildbee at the center of the circle. The world carried in a bee’s wing. These are not separate images — they are variations on a single idea: that we are entangled with the living world, whether we notice it or not. And that when we help children and communities notice — when we make pollinators visible, lovable, and worth protecting — we do something that science alone cannot.

We make people care.

I am honored to bring this work to the Together for Bees community, and to add one more voice — and one more bee — to this growing, blooming conversation about the world we share.