On Monday, the Living Learning Community at Kasteel Well hosted students, politicians, artists, academics, and scientists for the first-ever Kasteel Well Forum in the final days of the spring 2025 semester. 

An all-day event attended by a crowd of roughly 150, the forum marked the first time in the Kasteel program’s 40-year history that stakeholders from the community of Well and surrounding local areas were invited onto campus to see how students are learning and interacting with Dutch culture.

The event was led by Rob Dückers, executive director of Emerson College European Center, and Dr. Daan Lodder, program director for the LLC. It featured two keynote speakers and six groups of Kasteel students whose semester-long projects on the theme of water were selected to be showcased. 

In the LLC this semester, students created projects studying water alongside their regular coursework. Accompanying the forum, all 14 student groups will have their projects officially published through the Iwasaki Library, where they will be available for academic reference.

“We want students to have a clear dot at the end of the horizon that they can work towards for the whole semester,” Lodder said. 

Students like Luca Fero, a sophomore business of creative enterprises, said the event allowed for this reflection.

“[Having] this big event and seeing actual people outside of the college … and the results of it … was definitely good,” Ferro, whose group made a children’s storybook about the Dutch fable of the Waterwolf, said.

The six projects were focused on technology in nature, folklore, and water art, and used multimodal storytelling to present these topics in a way that was fresh and insightful even to a Dutch audience, Dückers said. Each presentation was ten minutes, ending with a group Q&A from the audience to ask questions. 

Presentations were preceded by two keynote addresses from Wouter Wolters, professor of Kasteel’s Science and Politics of Water course, and Dutch astronaut and physician André Kuipers.

Woulters discussed current climate issues faced by the Netherlands, which lie below sea level, like rising sea levels, and their various solutions.

In an interview with The Beacon, Woulters explained how each semester he watches his students come in with very little understanding of water and climate studies and leave with a much deeper knowledge. He cited the importance of the learning experience, given the lower climate awareness in America compared to the Netherlands.

“What came out of this is terrific,” Wolters said. “It affects very many people … but they have no idea … No one has been looking ahead into the future.”

He added that while community awareness and discourse on climate change is nice, it does little to change political realities, declaring in his keynote address that “science has lost” the climate battle and decrying decisions like the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement at the beginning of the year.

“I see the students being worried about climate change, but politics are so strong … What can any Emersonian or any average citizen in the U.S. do?” Wolters said. 

Kuipers, one of just three Dutch nationals to go to space in history, connected his experiences traveling to the International Space Station in 2004 and 2011 to water and the climate, explaining the importance of satellite imagery in identifying stress points for natural disasters and as a document for climate change.

“We are all astronauts on a spaceship with limited resources in a very inhospitable environment,” Kuipers told The Beacon. “Spaceflight helps to look at our planet, measure the problems, and then it’s up to young people like the students here to make sure that it’s a beautiful planet for the future as well.”

Maria Anzalotti, an interdisciplinary sciences major, created a Substack page with her group displaying written work connecting folklore storytelling with modern issues in climate science and city planning. She said she enjoyed the event and found the opportunity to connect with stakeholders “eye-opening.” 

“I wish we had had this sooner,” she said. “We’re global citizens now. We know what the earth feels like on the other side of the ocean, and so we have a job to do to protect that.”

During a Q&A session about what stories and myths the modern generation can create to communicate about climate, Anzalotti discussed a growing sense of climate doomism, or anxiety that nothing can be done to fix environmental crises, among Gen Zers.

“Any goal with stories we tell about climate change has to be mobilization … I wouldn’t have a [mythical creature] be our savior; I would have the savior be ourselves,” she said.

After the presentations, certificates of excellence were awarded to groups by Dückers, Dr. Michael Rauner, the mayor of Bergen, where Well is located, and Dr. Anthony Pinder, Emerson’s vice provost for internationalization and equity.

Rauner told The Beacon that embedding into local communities is necessary for true learning, and he hopes to see more interactive events like this going forward.

The main event was followed by a mixer where students got to network and interact with the attendees.

Pinder, who traveled from Boston for the event, said the LLC initiative is an attempt to address a previous lack of student connection to their host country, and praised the presentations for showing a sense of connectivity to the issues and identity of the Netherlands in a new way.

“What the students displayed today was that it’s just not a travel program … we are in fact observing what’s happening around us … [and] align[ing] what we’re learning with the modalities in which we learn whether it’s through art, film, or journalism,” Pinder said.

Taco De Marie, a Roermond-based visual artist and landscape architect, praised the use of multimedia in student presentations and said the unique location of Well, among the country generally as well as for students abroad, helps to foster an appreciation for the natural world that aids these discussions.

“It’s such a different world to be here than in your home city,” De Marie said. “This setting here for you and us is marvelous … [and helps] to [add to] a new view of how important water is for us.”

Students’ presentations could also have real-world implications on policy solutions, Jeroen Achten, an executive board member for Waterschap Limburg, a local water authority, said.

Achten, whose water board deals with flood prevention, dike construction, and water sufficiency and cleanliness across over 100 miles of the Meuse River, said he enjoyed students’ perspectives on issues like flooding and sustainability.

“When you look at different perspectives, you [may] come to other solutions [of how to] interact with the environment,” Achten said. “And that’s the challenge we have here because the castle [is also facing flooding concerns].” 

Dückers expressed pride in the work of LLC students this semester. “This idea of a group of 90 Americans coming in, and they are willing to engage and to create these connections, I think that is really powerful and positive, [and] it’s something we’re really grateful for,” he said.

Editor’s note: Bryan Hecht is an employee of The Living Learning Community at Kasteel Well. Hecht did not interview Dückers or Lodder for this story.