Schools using cotton to teach beauty of heritage

At a primary school in Beijing, students sow cotton seeds and harvest to learn about China's 24 solar terms and cotton production techniques. Both have been listed among China's intangible cultural heritage.

The program was recently honored by Beijing-based news website Youth as one of China's top 10 excellent practices in 2018 for promoting intangible cultural heritage on campus.

It originated from a discussion between Xi Xuesong, an associate professor at China Agricultural University, and Yang Ying, vice-president of Tsinghua University High School－Yongfeng, which offers eduction from primary through high schooling.

They decided that Xi's team would lead the program, which Hua Jinping, a cotton expert from CAU, and Zheng Fenlan, a representative inheritor of homespun cloth spinning, would offer technical advice.

The program combines the natural education of cotton's growth and humanistic education of cotton production, a national-level intangible cultural heritage item, Youth reported. It is open to all teachers and students in the primary school.

While planting cotton, students learn songs about the 24 solar terms, which were included on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage list in 2016. The solar terms are the systems that ancient Chinese relied on to keep pace with the change of seasons while farming and keeping daily routines.

Meng Weidong, executive principal of the Yongfeng school, said the program has been profoundly integrated into routine teaching and it inspires students' interest in learning.

Students from the first grade de-seed cotton and those from the second grade pick cotton. The third-grade pupils use bamboo spindles to spin and the fourth-graders tailor cloth book covers. Students from grades five and six use cotton thread to study embroidery and create cotton drawings.

The school has invited Zheng to teach students traditional handicrafts－weaving, dying, sewing and embroidering－and Li Haiyan from the Miao ethnic group in Hainan province to teach the students embroidery.

The program has been promoted nationwide and some other schools implemented it, such as Hangzhou Binhe Primary School in East China's Zhejiang province.

The school in Zhejiang also cooperated with Zheng to help students have better understanding of "Book of the Earth" and understand how daily articles around people are produced, said Tian Yanfang, the school's principal.

Zheng said the program is popular among students and it is a practice in response to the cultural and educational ministries' call to promote intangible cultural heritage on campus.

Apart from daily care of the cotton field, students record the process from seedling, flower buds to boll opening, Zheng said, adding they have spun cotton weighing 100 kilograms into book covers.

"Using covers that were made from cotton and spun by them, the students have gained far more than a book cover," Zheng said.

Tian said: "Planting cotton is just an entry point. The aim is to let students experience the beauty of Chinese traditional culture while learning cotton planting and coarse cloth weaving."

Meng from Yongfeng in Beijing said the school considers using flexible planting methods to include dye crops such as Isatis root and sunflowers to the planting list, offering fundamental crops for richer and systematic experiences of intangible cultural heritage.

songmengxing@chinadaily.com.cn