| I am a huge fan of using the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SGD) as a context for teaching and learning in the classroom. They are meaningful to the human experience and they call for action. Teachers do not need to manufacture reasons to engage with content if it is meaningful, and we ought to be engaging in matters of global significance. So, let's dive in to one goal and one resource today! The second global goal for sustainable development by 2030 is Zero Hunger. The Ending Rural Hunger website is one of the most comprehensive sites dedicated to a single SGD goal that I have yet come across. The data presented on the site is broken down based upon developing vs developed countries. This allows for data sets to be presented based on needs in the developing countries, while focusing more on policies of the developed countries. Another huge strength of this site is the fact that it has data on nearly every country. The only countries I could identify that were missing were the Baltic states and Western Sahara. Often real world data sets are pulled from various government agencies or one off UN projects that have a limited pool of data. This impacts student choice, and limits the scope of the inquiry that can be conducted. With the large selection of countries I could easily imagine a unit of inquiry where every student can choose between 2-4 countries to analyze in a formative assignment, and the teacher still have a good selection of countries to choose from for a summative assessment. International schools in developing countries could have the ability to interact with agencies that seeking to meet the need of ending hunger, and those in developed countries may choose to find a partner school or organization to team up with to take action. Beyond thinking globally, I would challenge anyone interested in this topic to consider asking your students to identify those within your own community who are nutritionally in need and seek to help meet their needs. There are no communities that I can think of where there are not those in need of food, even in the most affluent locations. |   |
Here are some topics that you might be teaching that could lend themselves to using data on ending hunger:
- Science: nutrition, agriculture, development, renewable resources, population dynamics.
- Math: averages, correlations, graphing, ratios, percentages.
- Humanities: human rights, access to resources, policy development, sustainable development, global goals, migration.
- Language Arts: news reports / writing an article, persuasive writing, letter writing, poetry, activism.
- Language Acquisition: if learning a language spoken in multiple countries then a comparative analysis between the countries, food and nutrition, social justice.
- Arts: protest art, raising awareness, exploring the human condition.
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