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the students had to decide whether their character would support a general strike against the Capitol after reading historical documents about the 1919 Seattle General Strike (note how the authors pair real historical events/documents with the novel).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!! :)