Rethinking Popular Culture and Media: "May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor"

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My relationship to The Hunger Games

Growing up in the 2000's meant that, as a vicarious reader, I consumed MANY dystopian YA books. For a period of time in my life, I exclusively read YA dystopian books. My all time favorite is The Hunger Games. As soon as I begun working with TFA, I imagined being able to teach The Hunger Games. It would be a dream come true to teach this at BVP. 

Rethinking Popular Culture and Media: "May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor"

"May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor" is a chapter written by Elizabeth Marshall and Matthew Rosati where they plan on "teaching class and collective action" through an analysis of The Hunger Games (book and movie). Marshall and Rosati posit that Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, "presents a powerful critique of economic injustice and capitalist ideals, and offers a vision of collective action largely led by youth" (234).  

While some of the chapter explains some themes of the books, most of the chapter describes how to teach this in classroom. If you wanted to base your lesson off of this chapter, you should aim to reach the following two goals. 

1. Challenge students' stereotypes about social class.
2. Encourage students to see class struggle as part of their own histories. 

Marshall and Rosati do this in a few interesting ways. The first is to have students try and define class  (Marshall and Rosati define class economic, social, and cultural). Marshall and Rosati mention that while many students had no problem identifying markers of different classes (upper class, middle class, working class, etc), they had problems identifying which class they belonged to. 

After having students explore what class they belong to, Marshall and Rosati split students into five groups based off of five different characters: Effie, Madge, Peeta, Rue, and Cato. Katniss should not be a category because she is the main character - having students explore other characters help students delve deeper into the text. Each group will have to decide whether or not the character will support a labor strike. Students also had to explore how the character would show their support. Would it be secretive? Obvious? 

Additional conversations are later had about the relation between power and class. Questions are asked about whether or not Madge can interact with a strike in the same way that a character like Rue could. Importantly, this chapter also mentions the other ways this book could be taught. Gender and race are two other popular ways to discuss this book. 

Takeaways

When students are given a chance to engage critically with media that they love, they are excited and eager to complete assignments. For many students, this lesson was considered fun. Finally, depending on the complexity you are hoping to achieve in your class discussion and learning, this lesson should be lengthened over the course of a few days, instead of one. While this book describes a lesson taught to university aged students, it is easily adapted to younger students.