Storytelling for Newcomers with Jingshu Yao

2024 TBA Storyteller Jingshu Yao and emerging historian returns to offer special storytelling sessions for ESL Learners in English.

These arts-based Storytelling workshops invite newcomers in Toronto to engage in artmaking and conversations about immigration, sensory memories, and community building. Each of the 3 workshops will centre one sensory element.. The sensory and art-based pedagogy seeks to prioritize alternative ways of learning and knowing that contrast with the traditional Western institutional focus on visual and text-based knowledge transmission. The workshop will offer newcomers, others with language barriers and/or anyone who needs an alternative style of expression to find their own methods through art-making and also offer opportunities for newcomer artists to build connections and create a sense of belonging through an artistic community.

Allison Glenn’s curatorial vision for the 2026 Biennial, Things Fall Apart, explores rupture as a way of understanding, at times connecting this to over sixteen waterways, trade routes, and voyages. and extending waterways across borders. Jingshu Yao will hold three (3) special Saturday sessions on November 14, 21, and 28, at 3 pm for Newcomers to Canada at the Art Museum, University of Toronto.

This program was made possible through a partnership with the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.