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 their fellow students, and other 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 planned and implemented, and rigorously assess the event’s pedagogical value. The groups, led by the second author, agreed to allow the first author to survey all participants just before and a few days after the event. 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.

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