In this book talk designed for K-12 educators and curriculum designers, Livia Blackburne will introduce how storytelling functions as more than just narrative art but can also be a transformative pedagogical tool. At the individual level, stories help learners articulate personal experience, build emotional resilience, and deepen self-expression in rich, contextualized language. Teachers will explore strategies for guiding students to reflect and create meaning from their lived experiences and express them with confidence, specificity, and emotional clarity. In this way, students develop critical language skills as a tool that both builds a sense of self and facilitates connections with others.
Moving outward, the talk connects individual narratives to community and cultural narratives that shape shared histories and values. Blackburne will highlight how communal stories develop from direct experience to historical accounts, and we will discuss how awareness of this development process can engage students in deeper cultural inquiry and critical thinking. These narratives help classrooms become spaces where learners negotiate meaning, question assumptions, and appreciate the multi-layered contexts behind language, culture, and identity. Teachers will gain practical activities for analyzing these narratives and making them central to meaningful learning. They will also come away with techniques for helping students pinpoint aspects of history that are underemphasized and give them tools for researching and writing their own historical accounts.
Finally, we will delve into myth and collective imagination, showing how teachers can facilitate exercises that harness shared vision and creativity. Myth, in this sense, isn’t just ancient lore but has long shaped cultural meaning and values across societies. It’s a way for learners to imagine futures, challenge dominant paradigms, and create stories that reflect both aspiration and cultural complexity. Educators will leave with classroom-ready ideas that let students co-construct visionary narratives and use storytelling as a vehicle for agency, empathy, and cultural exploration, making storytelling an engine for both language development and broader social understanding.
The first 25 registered K–12 educators will receive a FREE copy of Bing's Cherries, a beautifully illustrated book for classroom use.This program is sponsored by the USC U.S.-China Institute and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia.
👉 Register here
3:30-3:35pm - Opening
3:35-4:30pm - Presentation by Livia Blackburne
4:30-4:55pm - Q & A - Discussion Groups
4:55-5:00pm - Closing with the resources package
Featured Speaker:
New York Times bestselling author Livia Blackburne wrote her first novel while researching the neuroscience of reading at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since then, she’s switched to full-time writing, which also involves getting into people’s heads but without the help of a three tesla MRI scanner. Her YA books include Rosemarked (A YALSA Teens Top Ten Nominee), Disney’s Feather and Flame, and Clementine and Danny Save the World (And Each Other) (A Junior Library Guild selection) as well as the picture books Dreams to Ashes (An Orbis Pictus Honor Book) and I Dream of Popo, which received three starred reviews and was on numerous Best of Year lists. She is Chinese American and lives in southern California with her husband and daughter.