Hanck’s approach to teaching is hands-on—both for herself and for her students. While the life of the mind is revered at Chicago, “students also learn through their hands. They learn by doing things, by practicing, by talking to each other,” insists Hanck. And one of the best ways to learn about a topic, she says, “is to teach someone else.”

Bringing such active learning into the classroom is a challenge during her spring class in pharmacology. There is no lab. The class focuses on a small set of specific drugs and their targets. They look not just at a drug’s biochemistry or metabolism but also the process of its discovery, the economics of testing and marketing, and the social implications of drug development and use.

To keep students involved and “hands-on,” Hanck has the class teach, and grade, each other. They work in small groups to investigate a drug, organize the material, present it to the class and assess the other teams. That way, “they learn the material, but they also learn life skills,” explains Hanck. They learn to work in groups, to organize and coordinate their schedules, to get projects done on time. They also get to practice helping each other and offering criticism.”

Meredith teaches undergraduate students in the Fundamentals program and has used that opportunity to incorporate his passion for literature, one he never abandoned his passion during his academic training in the biological sciences.

His familiarity with James Joyce, Thomas Aquinas and Fyodor Dostoyevsky would later merge with his scientific teaching career at Chicago. A faculty member since 1979, Meredith developed an undergraduate course on literary and philosophical reflections on disease. Popular acclaim from his students brought an invitation to teach other undergraduate courses.

“Some theoretical approaches to literature—I am thinking in particular about some of the deconstructionists—seem intent on ripping the text apart, exposing what they think to be its underlying contextual assumption,” Meredith says. “I prefer to exercise what George Steiner called, in Real Presences, ‘cortesia’ towards the text—almost like being courteous to another person who is trying to tell us something,” Meredith says. “When I teach Joyce’s Ulysses, students should try to understand Joyce’s Ulysses. When I teach about peptides, they should understand peptides.”

- excerpted from stories by Steve Koppes, The University of Chicago Chronicle

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