Teaching Collective Action Through "The Hunger Games"

By the end of this post, readers will be able to understand the main points of "May the Odds Be Ever In Your Favor," a chapter from Rethinking Popular Culture and Media. 

Elizabeth Marshall and Matthew Rosati's chapter demonstrates how Suzanne Collins' novel, The Hunger Games, can be used to help students examine class inequality, power, and collective action. The authors begin by asking undergraduate students to reflect on their own experiences with social class. To do so, students are asked to write about a time they became aware of their own class or made assumptions about someone else's and what stereotypes informed their assumptions (education, clothing, speech, etc.). While many students could identify class stereotypes based on clothing, neighborhoods, or education, they struggled to define class as a system connected to power and privilege. The authors later reflect that rather than allowing students to explore their own definitions of class, they would explicitly introduce Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of economic, social, and cultural capital earlier in the lesson to give students a stronger foundation to contemplate alongside the novel.

"May the odds be ever in your favor." - Effie Trinket 

The most engaging part of their lesson is a role-playing activity where students are asked to take on the perspectives of characters like Rue, Peeta, Effie Trinket, Madge Undersee, and Cato; the authors intentionally left out Katniss so the students would have to explore other characters' motivations. Then, the students had to decide whether their character would support a general strike against the Capitol after reading historical documents about the 1919 Seattle General Strike (note how the authors pair real historical events/documents with the novel). This pairing of literature and real-life history encourages students to think about how social class shapes people's choices and how collective action can challenge systems of oppression. The authors' role playing handouts are included at the end of the chapter as well!

One of the chapter's greatest strengths is the authors' honesty about what did (and did not) work. For example, while many students expanded their understanding of class beyond simply "rich" and "poor," others held onto stereotypes or focused only on the role-play rather than the historical connections. Rather than presenting a perfect lesson, Marshall and Rosati explain how they would revise it by providing more background knowledge and incorporating discussions about how class intersects with race, gender, and sexuality.

What I appreciated most about this chapter is that it is much more than a summary of a lesson or class overview for teaching The Hunger Games. The chapter offers a thoughtful model for using popular culture to teach students about systems of power and social justice while encouraging them to connect literature to themselves, history and the world around them (text to self, text to text, and text to world!). If you're looking for an example of critical literacy that moves beyond traditional literary analysis, this article is well worth reading. Happy reading!! :)

Digital Tool Tutorial: Remind

Good afternoon! Today I will provide a tool tutorial for Remind. I wanted to provide a tutorial for this tool because it was something that my teachers used when I was in school and because it is what I will be doing for my final project (unless I change my mind in the next 2 days...!).

Even if I don't use Remind for my final project, it is still a tool I want to use next year. My school currently uses ParentSquare for communication home. However, this app/website relies on the phone numbers provided in school forms, which are often not turned in or are incorrectly filled out. Plus, as the name suggests, this is really meant to be a platform to contact parents or guardians, not students. While there is a feature to "message" students on ParentSquare, the messages are sent to their school emails which they rarely (if ever!) check. Thus, I would love to set my students up with Remind during the first week of school, so we have a way to communicate (with boundaries, aka without sharing my personal phone number!). Follow the steps below or click on this pdf flowchart.

Step 1: Navigate to https://www.remind.com (or download the app!).

Step 2: Click "Create an account" (or log in to an existing account).

Step 3: Log in or sign up with your email or phone number. You can also log in through Google.

Step 4: Check your inbox (if you signed up with email) or messages (if you signed up with a phone number) for the confirmation code.

Step 5: Accept the user agreement.

Step 6: Create a password.

Step 7: Enter your full name.

Step 8: Create a "class" (it does not need to be associated with a school - think of this as your "group name").

Step 9: Add people to your class by adding students', parents', and/or teachers' contact information. Add their first name, last name, and phone number/email. You can also set the language preference by entering the correct language code (see a list of codes provided by Remind here). For other ways to add users, click here!

Step 10: Now you are ready to send messages, share announcements, or post files!

For a more in depth tutorial on how to send messages, add files, or change your settings, please watch the video below!

Other Links:

• How to change your account settings (profile, notifications, etc.)
• How to add people (manually, pdf instructions, via text, or with a link)

Final Project

What ideas do you have about your final project?  Did any of the Media Literacy projects you reviewed in this deck on slide 8 inspire you?

Currently, I feel like I have decision paralysis. Coming off my first year of teaching, I have so many ideas running through my head and so many things that I want to improve for next year. I feel like the hardest part will be picking just one thing to change and trying to incorporate technology in a meaningful way to create this change. I was particularly inspired by the projects around student engagement, community, and communication. Below are some of the things I want to change (and how I might change/improve them):

• Communication with students and families (Remind App)
• More UDL assessment options (if my school allows: I would love to offer more options like, video essays, presentations, podcasts, etc.)
• Notetaking (offering online note catchers, like Google Docs, in addition to paper options)
• Student engagement during mini lessons (Mentimeter or something similar to offer live polls and surveys for students to complete - also works well for data and formative assessments)
• Experiential learning (virtual field trips)
• Extra help (Screencastify, Nearpod, or Canva to record slideshow presentations and post to Canvas - our school's Learning Management System - for students to access at any time)
• Technology skills (infographic - maybe with interactive links - to help teach and remind students of the necessary skills to access and use technology needed for the class; could be Canva or Piktochart)
• Varying ELL levels (using technology somehow to support station rotations, again could be something like Nearpod to create mini lessons and differentiate for different needs)
• Building class community (using something like GroupMe, Slack, or Blogger to build class community and allow students to share personal reflections - allow, admittedly, I do have fears about inappropriate comments/messages or bullying on these platforms)

As you can see, I have a lot of different ideas. I think it will come down to me assessing my beliefs about what is the biggest need. Right now, I am leaning towards the communication aspect. We have an app called ParentSquare, but it is - as the name applies - for family communication. We can use it to message students, but it goes to their emails, which they rarely, if ever, check. Thus, I think the Remind app would provide a more direct way to communicate announcements and provide students with a more direct avenue to me, should they need it. I remember most of my teachers used Remind in middle school and I appreciated being able to ask them questions and getting reminders about deadlines, events, and tutoring opportunities. I also feel like this option may be the most realistic for me to implement next year.

Finally, I feel like I am most nervous about the narrative part. I feel, from the examples I saw, that you really need to ground everything in the narrative; it seems like the narrative is what drives the pictures and ideas on the slides. For me, I feel like I will need to sit down and brainstorm my beliefs, connect them to my experiences, and then connect them to the thing I want to change, before wrapping up with how I plan to use technology to create that change. Honestly, my brain hurts a little, but I know I'll get there.

Ferlazzo and Gallant & Rettinger Texts

 

What is your personal relationship to AI? How do the arguments of Ferlazzo or Galland & Rettinger feel to you?  Do they resonate with you? Alienate you? Scare you? Excite you? 

Personally, I see AI as a "thought partner." As a first-year teacher, AI has been a helpful way to quickly differentiate lessons and to brainstorm teaching/engagement strategies without having to scour the internet. Thus, I found myself nodding my head as I read the Ferlazzo article. I really resonated with the first teach who described AI as a tool to create her "starting point, not [her] finished product" (2025). Like this teacher, I believe that what AI spits out is a "rough draft" and it is then the responsibility of the expert (the person putting in the prompt) to critically evaluate the product and make adjustments to fine-tune the product to best meet your needs. This year, being my first-year of teaching and having to plan for 90-minute blocks, I spent roughly 4-6 hours on each lesson, often even with the help of AI. Thus, I can only imagine how many hours it would have taken me had I not had this tool at my disposal. Similar to Ferlazzo, I feel like as I get more familiar with my curriculum and pedagogy, AI will continue to be a time-cutting tool that takes my practices from something that takes hour to minutes (2025). I was also inspired by these second teacher's story of using AI in the classroom to make high-level scientific material more accessible to students (Ferlazzo, 2025). As someone who teaches primarily ELL students, I feel like AI is a useful took to create summaries and adjust reading levels to increase access and thus engagement with high-level material. However, I do question the notion that AI can accurately translate, despite what was shared in the third piece of Ferlazzo's article (2025). Regarding the Galland & Rettinger article, I was intrigued by the idea that cheating is driven by a variety of factors and the importance of addressing the "reasons for cheating, rather than the behaviors" (2025). I feel like this article helped me understand the root causes of cheating and it humanized, rather than villainized, the students. Also, as someone who works in a high school, I resonated with their sentiments that students are not taught how to properly research and cite articles; thus, they often do not know what cheating looks like (Galland & Rettinger, 2025). Unfortunately, I disagree that students can recognized basic cheating, such as copying and pasting from websites, because this is behavior I have seen numerous times in my own classroom. This notion takes me back to the Spiegel (2018) article in the sense that it highlights the need to teach students both technology skills and media ethics; students must learn these skills at some point, and I feel like the further we go up the educational ladder, the more we assume students already have these skills. In a time where technology and innovation are happening at such a high speed, I feel like we must help students identify cheating vs appropriate research and citations just as much as creating an environment where they feel they are capable of doing the work and also have opportunities to learn, fail, and grow.

 

Spiegel vs Prensky

What do you make of the (divergent) positions of Spiegel and Prensky? 

I agree with Spiegel that Prensky’s terminology is outdated and may even be dangerous. I think Spiegel hits the nail on the head when she says this terminology "leads all educational stakeholders to believe that children already know how to use these devices” which “eliminate[s] the teaching of foundational skills necessary to operate the equipment produced” (2018). Thankfully, I had a computer class in elementary school where we learned how to type (with those classic rubbery orange covers on the keys). We also engaged with different types of media online and had opportunities to explore games and educational resources online. In fifth grade, our librarians also planned a project where we learned how to conduct research online, what sources were trustworthy, and how to cite information without plagiarizing—which at this age was just copying and pasting the link where you found the information. As someone who fits Prensky’s definition of a “Digital Native” — someone who “spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys of the digital age” (2001a) — I am grateful that my schools did not neglect to teach me the skills necessary to engage with these technologies. Unfortunately, I see this has not been the case with my own students. Despite teachers being forced to use digital platforms, like Canvas (our learning management system) and Skyward (online attendance and grading), students often do not know how to engage with these platforms. When providing online assignments, I realized I have to spend a significant amount of time introducing the technology and skills required to complete the assignment. Further, I quickly realized students have not been taught how to appropriately send emails, yet that is our school’s expected primary form of digital communication. Thus, I hope to introduce “Professionalism Mondays” next year, where I can introduce 30-minute digital and professional skills that are aligned to our ELA curriculum. I am encouraged by the ELA examples Spiegel provides and excited to see how this takes shape in my classroom next year!

What do you hear each of them saying about who youth are?

In Prensky’s definition, I hear him saying that youth are experts on technology simply because they grew up around it. However, I hear Spiegel challenge this by introducing new terms, such as “digital creator,” “digital socialites,” “digital gamer,” and “digital worker”; these terms imply that students may specialize in engaging with technology in a certain way and leaves room to “present learning opportunities that vary to engage different technology users and offer opportunities for students to learn to use technology in ways they have not before” (Spiegel, 2018). I agree with Spiegel that schools must include courses and curricula that teach students basic technology skills beginning at the elementary level. Otherwise, despite students growing up with technology at their fingertips, they may enter the workforce digitally “illiterate.”

Where do you stand on the “digital native” terminology?

All-in-all, I believe the term "digital native" wrongly assumes students’ ability to engage with and effectively use all types of technology whereas Spiegel’s terms leave room for specialization and encourage varied engagement with technology as well as traditional ways of learning, all which are necessary for students to effectively engage in the workforce beyond school. 

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