Poetic Play for Sustaining Chinese Linguistic and Cultural Heritage

• In Event: Culturally Sustaining Early Literacy Pedagogies and Our Futures: Dynamic Stories and Practices from PK-6 Communities

Abstract

Objectives: In a community-based Chinese heritage language education program in the southeastern U.S., poetry is being incorporated as an arts-based and multimodal practice to support young children's multilingual and multicultural development. Through examples from the lesson materials and students' work, the presenter discusses how poetry enacts culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP), translanguaging, and multimodality to support the local Chinese community's heritage language and cultural maintenance.
Theoretical Framework: This presentation focuses on practicing techniques that are grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014), translanguaging (Li, 2018), and multimodality (Cun, 2025). These frameworks are drawn to share a poetry unit taught in the program. It highlights that poetry is not simply as a literary form but as a culturally embedded community practice that sustains multimodal heritage knowledge and practices.
Techniques: A Chinese poetry unit was implemented in a nonprofit, community-based Chinese heritage language program in the southeastern U.S. The unit incorporated classical and prose-based Chinese poetry teaching and learning enriched by bilingual music, visuals, and picture books. Students engaged in translanguaging by using English and diasporic Chinese to interpret, discuss, and create poems. Instruction included explicit teaching of poetic devices, vocabulary, and rhyme, alongside invitations to connect the texts to students’ everyday experiences, home languages, and heritage cultures.
Materials: Key materials included a prose passage “春雨” (Spring Rain), a classical Tang Dynasty poem “春晓” (A Spring Morning), a musical adaptation of the ancient poem, and a picture book series featuring seasonal poetry and accompanying audio explanations. Students were also given a guided template to observe natural phenomena and create their own poems, using translanguaging techniques that draw on their entire linguistic repertoire.
Significance: Students demonstrated a deep engagement with Chinese learning through multilingual and multimodal approaches. Students explored literary devices such as rhyme, metaphor, and imagery across languages as linguistic repertoire expansion. Notably, some students' work illustrated diversity within the Chinese diasporic community, drawing from transgenerational knowledge and heritage to learn and compose poetry to disrupt the dominant linguistic landscapes of English and Chinese Mandarin within the local community. These multilayered translanguaging, artistic, and multimodal aspects offered insights into arts-based culturally sustaining practices in community spaces (Wang et al., 2022).
Results: This chapter contributes to the fields of heritage language education and culturally sustaining pedagogy by illustrating poetry’s potential to bridge multilingual and multimodal literacies in community-based settings. It highlights how poetry can sustain students' heritage language and culture while embracing students’ lived experiences, linguistic repertoires, and cultural knowledge. It also calls attention to the diversity within diasporic communities, advocating for more inclusive pedagogical practices that reflect various backgrounds and home traditions. Importantly, the presentation underscores the need for educators to adopt reflexive and flexible approaches that honor such diversity and encourage students to express heritage knowledge through creative and multimodal approaches.

Author

• Yixuan Wang, Gwinnett County Public Schools