In this seminar, we focused on Houston. We benefited from two related factors: the extraordinary diversity of our metropolitan community and the wide range of experience in our community that the Houston Independent School District teachers brought to the table. Of the ten teachers who completed these curriculum units, eight were native to the area, and the other two had been in Houston for two decades. We thus had close to 400 years of residency to draw on in class discussions and projects. The result was an interesting mix of projects ranging from a focus on traditional neighborhoods in the city like the Third Ward, to outlining a broad transportation strategy for one of the most automobile-congested cities in the nation.
Our group also benefited from an opportunity to meet with Houston's recently retired mayor, Bob Lanier. The former Mayor, who left office in January, 1998 with a job approval rating of over eighty percent, spent an hour and a half with the seminar, and addressed a number of issues and questions about local politics that had arisen over the semester.
The experience of our seminar suggests, in my opinion, that future Houston Teachers Institute seminar groups, and those in other cities, should take advantage of their local communities as laboratories in developing topics and curriculum units. I hope that when utilizing these curriculum units, you will realize that there are an endless number of fascinating stories right here in our own communities and these can be exploited to develop teaching units that will interest other teachers and excite the students.