January 22 - April 29
All seminars are on Tuesdays from
5:30-7:30 PM unless otherwise noted.
The Institute was established in 1998 and is affiliated with the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. It is a partnership between the University of Houston and the Houston Independent School District whose purpose is to increase subject matter skills for public school teachers. All seminar leaders are senior faculty members at the University of Houston. Fellows must be classroom teachers in the Houston Independent School District. Applications are due by October 26, 2007.
The Institute wishes to acknowledge its gratitude to the following foundations for their very generous support:
Houston Endowment Inc.
The Powell Foundation
The Simmons Foundation
The Rockwell Fund
Washington Mutual
What are the Benefits to Participants?
For additional information on these seminars and an application to become a Fellow in the Houston Teachers Institute, visit our website at www.uh.edu/hti and attend our Open House on Tuesday, Oct. 2 at 4:30 PM-7:00 PM at the Rockwell Pavilion on the second floor of the M.D. Anderson Library.
One Cell to Many: The Dynamics of Life
Amy Sater, Department of Biology and Biochemistry
In this seminar, we will examine several fundamental principles of biology, seeking ways to introduce these ideas that will spark the student imagination. Basic concepts include life cycles (“How do plants and animals change during their lifetimes?”) cell division (“How do plants and animals get bigger? How do cells make more cells?”), and genes and heredity (“Why do offspring look like their parents?”). We will also discuss several major types of cells and how they function in the human body. We will draw on examples that are “close to home,” so that teachers will develop strategies to help their students discover the answers to questions based on their own experiences (e.g., “Why are there so many types of dogs?”). Where applicable, we will develop opportunities to integrate other areas, such as math, art, or language arts in interdisciplinary lesson plans. This seminar is appropriate for teachers K-5, and middle school teachers are especially encouraged to apply.
The Remaking of Houston:
Immigration and New Communities in the Houston Area
Nestor Rodriguez, Department of Sociology
Meets on Monday evenings 5:30 - 7:30 PM
Since the 1990s the nation has witnessed a record-setting wave of immigration of peoples from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe. Houston and other large metropolitan areas, e.g., New York and Los Angeles, are the primary recipients of the new immigrants. In many ways, new immigrants are interacting with U.S. institutions, such as, labor markets, school systems, and religious places of worship, and creating new communities. This seminar is geared for teachers who seek a greater understanding of how immigration affects education, communities, and student populations in the Houston area.
Great Films and How They Shaped American Politics
Victor L. Mote, Department of Political Science
Meets on Monday evenings 5:30 - 7:30 PM
If politics is “who gets what, when, and how,” then humans, whether they are in (or out) of the professional political arena, practice it all the time; thus, filmmakers endlessly create politics with their portrayals of the human condition. From the outset, politics perfused cinematic works, such as Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915), which appeared to justify Jim Crow, and Bronenosets “Potemkin” (The Battleship “Potemkin,” S.M. Eisenstein, 1925), which did the same for the Bolshevik Revolution in the USSR. Indeed, all over the world, the medium of film has shaped and been shaped by politics.
Our seminar will focus on U.S. politics and films, of which there is no shortage. Fellows from all disciplines and grade levels are welcome. Each week Fellows will be responsible for viewing one or two films that have imitated or influenced the nation's political behavior. Participants, guided by one of their colleagues, will engage in lively discussions of what they gleaned from the medium. In the end the experience should inspire the development of carefully analyzed Curriculum Units that will be suitable for use in HISD classrooms throughout the city.
Capturing the Creative Moment:
An Interdisciplinary View of the Arts
Noe Marmolejo, Moores School of Music
Meets on Monday evenings 5:30 - 7:30 PM
This seminar will investigate the contributions of artists from various disciplines including music, poetry/literature, photography, sculpture and painting. The focus of this seminar will deal with some of the specific works of Ellington, Coltrane, Armstrong, Jeffers, Donne, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Joyce, Cummings, Hopkins, Adams, Weston, Eisenstaedt, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Monet, Manet, and others. This seminar should be of interest to those teachers who might be developing a program of study that will expose students to the arts from a perspective of what the artist is seeking from himself and his environment.
Understanding Youth Culture
Joseph A. Kotarba, Department of Sociology
Meets on Monday evenings 5:30 - 7:30 PM
A rich and complex youth culture has been visible in our society ever since the end of World War II. As adolescence became a distinct stage of life, young people have developed their own way of life, sets of values, and ways of doing things. Youth culture has evolved two ways: first, it now extends to children and young adults; and second, it has been increasingly powered by the mass media and electronic technology. This seminar will examine the role of youth culture in our society for two purposes: first, to better understand our students and their behaviors; and second, to develop strategies for incorporating youth culture into our teaching. Specific topics will include (among others): iPODS, Internet dating and communicating, gaming, radio/television, tagging, hip hop culture, and youth culture and the family.
African History:
Ancient Times to the Atlantic Slave Trade Era
Kairn A. Klieman, Department of History
Of the great many tragedies the Atlantic Slave Trade engendered, one of the most damaging has been the myth that Africa is a continent without history, a place where nothing of historical importance ever occurred until foreigners arrived to introduce new technologies and ideas. To this day it remains difficult for high school and college instructors to incorporate Africa into their curriculum. This is not only due to an ongoing lack of information about Africa in our undergraduate training, but also the fact that one must feel prepared to deal with the intensity of emotions that discussions of Africa and the Slave Trade can bring up among students. This seminar is designed to help teachers of grades 8-12 introduce African history to their students in appropriate, informative, and responsible ways. Books, articles, historical epics, and films will be used to provide participants with up-to-date scholarship on these periods of African history.
Real Wor(l)d Problems
Kresimir Josic, Department of Mathematics
While word problems are dreaded by nearly all students, they do provide the most immediate way of connecting abstract mathematical ideas to real world situations. The goal of this seminar is twofold: First, we will discuss how to introduce problems from everyday life into the classroom to expand on the “canned” examples that are frequently found in textbooks. This part of the seminar will deal with how to view and understand the world around us using the tools of mathematics and statistics. The second goal is to try to develop effective approaches to solving word problems. Most problems fall into classes, and even when they do not there are general principles that can be followed in an attempt to solve them. There will be no textbook for the seminar; however, I will provide copies of selected articles and chapters from a number of books, including Paulos' A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper and Polya's How to Solve It.
Everyday Physics: The Way the World Works
Gemunu Gunaratne, Department of Physics
How do cars, airplanes, and rockets move? How can sailboats move upwind? How do rotating water sprinklers, steam engines and air-conditioners work? What are the principles behind musical instruments, radio and TV, compact disc players, Xerox machines, microwave ovens, and MRI machines?
In the seminar we will discuss how basic principles of physics can be used to get a good grasp of the workings of these machines. We will also discuss the physics of natural phenomena like rainbows, monsoons, hurricanes, and seasons. Other possible topics for the seminar include those of current interest, including energy generation and global warming.
The topics to be discussed in the seminar will be decided in consultation with the Fellows. Discussions will be at the level of How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Life by L. A. Bloomfield and Thinking Physics: Understandable Practical Reality by L. C. Epstein.
Seeing through Geometry
Mike Field, Department of Mathematics
This seminar is a sequel to the Hands on Geometry seminar given in 2004 and should mainly be of interest to teachers of mathematics, K-12 (perhaps especially elementary and middle school teachers). An essential part of the seminar will be making mathematical models ranging from tessellations and tilings to polyhedral models. (Help, materials and practice will be given for the making of these models - past experience suggests that children acquire necessary skills far more quickly than adults so we will start work on how to make polyhedral models in seminar 1). Other topics that we will likely cover will be Mobius bands, knots, soap bubbles, mathematically influenced sculpture (see http://www.isama.org/hyperseeing) and fractals. I hope also to arrange a Zome-tool workshop. More (or less) advanced material will be included depending on the interests of the group (for example, non-Euclidean geometries). There will be no text book but I will provide notes (and templates for some of the objects). Overall the aim is to develop an appreciation and love of the visual side of mathematics and to improve visualization and pattern recognition skills.
Sport, Education, and Social Issues
Russell L. Curtis, Jr., Department of Sociology
In this seminar we will look at how sports in the United States evolved from informal folk events in the early 20th century to large scale corporate and financial activities that now influence national and urban policies and shape individual life-interests. We will investigate the social changes that expanded sports from their small, informal beginnings to their current position as dominant urban forces and national media events. We will also discuss the uses of sport in schools from elementary school through high school and the special place of sport in U.S. universities. In addition, we will examine how sport is linked with other institutional arrangements including family activities, political processes, and religious influence. Teachers of all disciplines K-12 will find this seminar useful as they explore the concept of how sport and social issues are relevant to their particular students.
Comedy in Literature: Greece to Hollywood
Merrilee Cunningham, Department o f English, UHD
Meets on Monday evenings 5:30 - 7:30 PM
Since Bergson's groundbreaking studies of comedy and laughter, theorists such as Bakhtin, with his study of laughter, have studied why the members of a culture or subculture laugh, what is considered funny in that culture, the relationship of comedy to power, what are the limits of comedy and satire, and the relationship of comedy to social change.
This seminar will begin with pre-dramatic moments of laughter in Homeric epic and continue with early Greek and Roman comedy, Renaissance dramatic and prose comedies, neo-classical comedy, both drama and prose, social satire and comedic moments in the Nineteenth century novel, and end with modern comedy, social satire and the movies, radio, TV, standup and hybrid modes. Comedy and nationality; comedy and ethnicity, and comedy and race will be discussed.
This seminar is appropriate for primary, middle and high school teachers as we will work with reading readiness in classical and satiric comedies as well as Shakespearean comedy and the comedy of popular culture. Fellows from all teaching grade levels are encouraged to apply.
What Does It Mean to be an American? :
Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States
Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Department of English
This seminar will include a study of poetry, plays, short stories, short novels, and non-fiction prose from a variety of writers, including American Indians, African Americans, Anglo Americans, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, Cuban Americans, Jewish Americans, Mexican Americans, Indian Americans/Asian Indians, and other ethnic groups that populate America. The aim of this seminar will be to read and discuss multi-ethnic literatures of the United States that shed light on the various ways in which ethnic groups in America define who they are and communicate what is important to them as they live in a country that cherishes freedom above all else. This seminar should be of interest to teachers from K-12 in all disciplines because of the plethora of students who are struggling to come to terms with their American identity, one in which they simultaneously experience a sense of uniqueness from others and a sense of affiliation to others in an American context. Teachers interested in increasing their knowledge of American cultures are encouraged to apply.