East Asia LitFest
This annual event is sponsored by the CEAS Title VI Department of Education National Resource Center grant for 2022-2025, the Kansas Consortium for Teaching about Asia, and the KU School for Education and Human Sciences.
In the past, this event has had several different formats. However, this event officially includes an in-service educator workshop, pre-service educator workshop, and a public talk for the community. Our goal with LitFest is to share a story with an East Asian focus for teachers to be able to use in the classroom.
CEAS does our best each year to purchase a copy of the featured book and create class materials for educators in attendance at these events. We hope to see you at our next LitFest!
2024 LitFest with Ellen Oh
Ellen Oh is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books and winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award Honor for Children’s Literature for her novel, Finding Junie Kim.
During her time at KU, Ellen gave presentations to three audiences: In-Service Educators at Cordley Elementary School, Pre-Service Educators at KU, and to the Lawrence community at the Carnegie Building. Her presentations emphasized the vitalness of having diverse perspectives in children's literature.
In showing how children need to be taught empathy, she retold first-hand experiences of herself and her family on how diverse perspectives and banned books changed their lives. She even went further in discussing how one banned book saved South Korea in fueling the democratic movement in the 1980s. This movement is known as the 5.18 Gwangju Democratic Uprising.
If you would like to learn more about Ellen Oh, We Need Diverse Books, or the themes from her presentation, please select the links on the side.