Workshops for Teachers
The Pare Lorentz Center has developed a teacher workshop that uses historic film clips and documents to present information regarding a particular event of their choosing. We train teachers to view history as a filmmaker might by drawing on Pare Lorentz’s methods of carefully considering and deconstructing a complex subject and presenting it to an audience as a logical, multi-layered narrative, in a way that is both evocative and informative.
In the workshop, teachers are shown how to break historic events down into the three elements of a narrative as told in a story.
- The beginning, where we are introduced to the setting, the main characters—protagonists and antagonists and supporting characters—the theme, tone, and mood.
- The middle, where the protagonist and the antagonist come into some sort of a conflict with each other and then struggle to resolve it.
- The end, where the conflict is resolved and from which lessons and morals can be identified.
These lessons and morals can then be examined, debated and applied to modern events.
For more information about our teacher workshops contact the library’s education specialist Jeffrey Urbin at (845) 486-7761 or by email at Jeffrey.Urbin@nara.gov.