In New York City and throughout the U.S., City Lore staff and consultants offer staff development programs for individual schools and school districts. Faculty is drawn from professionals at Bank Street College of Education, the Smithsonian Institution, and City Lore among others. Programs address such contemporary teaching issues as using your geographic region as a resource for building on and creating new curriculum, oral history, arts and children’s literature in the social studies curriculum, quality resources on the Internet, and literacy through storytelling.

Workshops and Trainings

Summer Training Opportunities
Find training opportunities for K-12 educators in folk arts, folklife, and oral history around the country. Many are open to educators nationwide; others are for local participants.

Staff Development for NYC Teachers
City Lore offers staff development to New York City teachers on how to integrate cultural studies and the arts into the core curriculum. We also provide cultural sensitivity and diversity trainings. For more information, please contact Amanda Dargan, Education Director adargan@citylore.org or call 1.800.333.5982 ext 302.

History First Hand
History First Hand (HFH), a three-year partnership between City Lore, Community School District One on New York's Lower East Side, and the Gotham Center, provided teachers, grades 3 to 8, with a new way of teaching history. From 2000 to 2003, the partnership developed four courses focusing on American history, with a special emphasis on the history of New York City. These courses provide opportunities for integrating New York City themes into core subject areas and for familiarizing teachers with new ways to integrate ethnographic and historical research and teaching strategies.

National Teacher Institutes
We offer planning and faculty for teacher institutes that train teachers how to use their students' and communities' resources effectively and creatively in the classroom. Our institutes also offer hands-on opportunities for teachers to tap into their own creative talents, conduct fieldwork research, and use the arts as a teaching tool across disciplines.

Parent Workshops
City Lore staff offers parent and family workshops in which parents, children, and teachers share family and personal experience stories and learn skills for documenting family and community traditions. City Lore staff works alongside parents in a structured series of activities designed to build literacy skills and promote cross-cultural and intergenerational understanding.

Professional Development for Teaching Artists
City Lore offers teaching artists training in self-presentation, working with folk traditions, and facilitating student research into family and community as a source for new artwork.

Publications

Culture Catalog
This online catalog for teachers contains some of the best educational materials in the fields of oral history, folklore, and cultural studies. Each year schools participating in City Lore's artist residencies or staff development workshops receive a 10% discount on Culture Catalog orders (excludes sale items).

CARTS Newsletter
Each issue of our annual national newsletter is devoted to exploring the intersections of culture, art, and education. Past newsletters have focused on poetry, immigration, intergenerational programming, and storytelling. Each issue offers readers classroom activities, point of view essays from teachers, students and artists around the country, profiles of community-based artists, ideas for community exploration fieldtrips, model projects, national folk arts in education news and highlights of books and resources relating to the newsletter focus. Please contact catalog@citylore.org or call 1.800.333.5982 ext 305 to purchase a copy of the newsletter ($5).