Session 3 · about 55 minutes · B1 / B2 / C1
Film work: scenes in wordsDescribe, then separate fact from fiction
Work on the film through words only; sort documented history from invention.
Scene cards (no stills)
A · The broken-down car. Three women by a car; a police officer; NASA changes his attitude.
B · The briefing room. Katherine asks to attend the engineering briefing; a male engineer resists.
C · The bathroom sign. In the film a manager smashes a segregated bathroom sign. This smashing scene is fictional; Al Harrison is a composite character.
Choose one card. Write eight to ten lines: what we would see and what it suggests about power at work.
Describe one card (120 words) then add a short paragraph: fact, fiction or compressed? Why?
Write a 200-word media commentary: how cinema turns slow institutional change into one spectacular workplace gesture, and what that risks for public understanding of careers and civil rights.
Fact or film?
| Statement | ? |
|---|---|
| Dorothy Vaughan became NACA’s first Black supervisor in 1949. | |
| Mary Jackson became NASA’s first Black female engineer in 1958. | |
| Al Harrison smashes the bathroom sign with a crowbar. | |
| John Glenn wanted Katherine Johnson to check the computer’s numbers before Friendship 7. | |
| Glenn’s request happens during the launch countdown exactly as in the film. | |
| Al Harrison is one single historical manager. |
Show answers · sorting key
- Fact
- Fact
- Film fiction
- Fact in substance
- Compressed / dramatised
- Fiction (composite)
Rewrite Scene C in 80 words as a historian: real segregation vs film invention.
120 words + 45-second oral: “One thing the film invents… One thing it gets right…”
180-word argument: Is dramatising a workplace injustice justified if it brings careers out of invisibility?