Menno Simons College Students Put on Play About Hunger For Final Exam

Were Graded On How Well They Put Lessons Into Practice

For most university students, writing final exams this month means sitting in a classroom, furiously trying to remember and write down all the things they learned during the past semester.

But not for the 25 members of Kenton Lobe’s Participatory Local Development course at Menno Simons College, the campus of CMU at the University of Winnipeg. For their final exam they are putting on a play about hunger.

Called Unequal Harvest, the play was performed to a sold-out audience of 120 on December 14 at Prairie Theatre Exchange.

“It’s a pretty unique learning experience,” says Alison Ralph, a member of the class. “It’s teaching us practical things we can do to try to bring change to the world.”

The goal of the course, according to instructor Kenton Lobe, is to help students learn about ways people throughout history have tried to address issues like hunger and poverty, and then to try their hands at creating changes at a local level.

“I want them to see that they have the power to create change,” he says. “I want them to not only reflect on how change happens, but also to see it happen as they put the things they’ve learned into action.”

Class members were allowed to choose their final exam project. They elected to put on the play, which was commissioned by the Canadian Foodgrains Bank and written by local playwright Geoff Hughes.

“We wanted to use the arts as a way to explore the root causes of hunger, and show that there is no one-size fits-all approach to the problem,” says Meagan Peasgood, Youth Engagement Coordinator at the Foodgrains Bank.

The play offers Canadians a real-life glimpse into the plight of hungry people around the world and in Manitoba. The issue is brought to life by local actors playing characters such as a Bangladeshi widow, a schoolteacher from Laos, a single mother on social assistance in Canada, a Canadian farmer and a Paraguayan peasant, among others.

“This is all about giving people a glimpse of what hunger means to people both here and in the developing world, and what some of the causes are,” says Ralph.

To produce the play, the students divided themselves into information, publicity, venue and food committees; in addition to the play, the event will features samples of locally-produced food from area farmers.

The students will be graded 40 percent on their preparations leading up to the performance, and 60 percent on the outcome, Lobe says.

“I can’t imagine having a sit-down exam,” says Ralph of the end of course. “We are learning by doing, and also learning the value of doing practical, concrete things, and of how we can make a difference in the world.”

This is the second time Lobe has used practical experiences as a way to give students a final grade in the course, which he taught last year at CMU’s Shaftesbury campus in Charleswood. Students in that class organized a day of workshops and protests about climate change, and followed it up by making a quilt that identified the things they would do to reduce their carbon footprint. The quilt was then delivered to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

In addition to CMU and the Foodgrains Bank, other sponsors of Unequal Harvest were Winnipeg Harvest and Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Canada.