Starving for Knowledge: An Active Learning Approach to Teaching About World Hunger

Two student groups on the campus of a small liberal arts college in the United States utilized a role-playing dramatization created by a major international non-governmental organization to teach members of the campus community about world hunger. In this article, we situate the role-play exercise within the wider literature on active learning techniques; discuss how the event was implemented, and rigorously assess the event’s pedagogical value. Participants in Oxfam America’s “Hunger Banquet ” clearly demonstrated a statistically significant level of increased knowledge about world hunger. We also show that they demonstrated a greater degree of knowledge acquisition than students who learned the same material in a traditional classroom format.