Script for 2 Podcast Episodes

Student-hosted conferences are a great way to enhance students research,

communication, collaboration, critical thinking as well their organizational,
logistical and marketing skills. So I’m going to talk about how we can use
Conferences are a great way to improve In this series of podcast, I’m going to
talk about how we can use conferences as a method of teaching. I’ll be using
something called Model United Nations (MUN) as an example and then show
how it can serve as a template for other kinds to of student conferences. We’ll
have a few podcasts on this but in today’s i minute podcast we are just looking
at the components of the MUN.

So MUN, or Model United Nations, is just a simulation of the UN conference.

Students taking part in MUN act as delegates of countries and come together
to discuss and hopefully solve an issue that demands the worlds attention.
Since the topics cut across health, social, technological, economic, political and
other fields, all types of students can be expected to benefit greatly from the
conference. For EMI students, it’s a great opportunity to extend their reading of
more complex material, provide them with academic writing practice, improve
their debating and negotiating skills, and provide them with strong practice on
public speaking skills. For EMI teacher, it provides a structured way of achieving
this.

At the beginning, students are provided a topic paper that describes a problems
and provided the set of questions that require a resolution. This paper can just
be a few paragraphs and doesn’t need to be that long. Examples of topic
research papers can be found at https://www.oregonmun.org/agenda-topics.

In addition to the topic paper, the different groups are assigned countries to
represent. This transforms each person from a student into a delegate of
country. And they are also told which UN conference that will be attending. For
example, they might be attending a conference by the world health organization,
the human rights council, or the security council, the commission on science
and technology for development, or another conference. Knowing the country
they represent, the main topic of the conference, and the conference they will
be attending, they can now begin their journey of preparing for the conference.

Their preparation will involve the following:

First, the students will do some research about the United Nations to get a basic
understanding of it.
Next, they will do write two papers: a county research and a position paper. The
first paper helps them develop a good understanding of country’s national
interests based on its political, economic, social, technological system and
other systems and also based on its partners - old and emerging— and current
threats. The second papers is a crucial paper because it show the country’s
position in relation to the problem across time— from past and present to future.
These two papers, the country research and position paper, can be done
separately or as just one paper.

Once they have finished the position paper, they will use it to craft a short
opening speech for the conference. Through the opening speech, the delegate
aims to let everyone know how his country has stood in relation to the problem
and what he wants from all countries in order to resolve the problem. Essentially,
the delegate takes the written language of the position paper and transforms it
into a public speech. In addition to the opening speech, students also need to
get ready to debate and discuss the topic of the conference.

After sufficiently practicing their opening speeches and preparing their debating
points, they will eventually hold a conference with each other.

How long should the conference itself be? We began this podcast by
suggesting that course material could be though through a conference such as
the MUN or another type of conference as this would enable students to also
learn some core English language competencies. If it is assumed that this is
the way in which you would be doing the conference, then preferably you may
want to allocate about 2- 3 weeks of lessons to the conference itself. Since
each week of lessons is 2 hours in Taiwan, that amounts to about 6 hours for
the conference. The conference will involve the following:
Opening speeches and debates
Resolution and Voting

So you could allocate two weeks of Lesson to the first part and one week of
lesson to the second part.

Let’s see what we have got so far:

As I have said, at the beginning students are assigned a topic for the conference,
told which country they would be representing at the conference and what type
of conference they would be attending. Next they do their papers and prepare
their opening speeches and debating points. Finally the delegates will host a
conference with each other. The outcome of their conferencing should be joint
resolution paper by a few countries and a vote by all delegates on the best
resolution to the problems.

As described today, that’s generally what the model United Nations is. Of
course it’s just the big picture on what MUN is but I hope it gives you some
curiosity to discover MUN and using conferences as a means to teach the
course. Let’s look forward to our next episode where we delve into some details
of MUN. So good night and goodbye.
——
Now yesterday when we got together we looked what model United Nations or
MUN generally is about. We said that ITS it’s a simulation of the UN conference
where students acting as delegates of different countries gather to discuss and
hopefully resolve a problem by tackling a set of questions on the problem. At
the beginning students are assigned a topic and a set of questions on it and
they are told which countries they will be representing and the of the conference
they would be representing. Thereafter, they wrote papers and prepare
speeches and their debate points. Eventually they hold a conference with each
other and must produce at least two resolution papers for all countries to vote
on.

Today, I want to look at the process of the conference, specifically the kind of
people you would have on the conference. If you’d like to know how to do the
country research, position paper and opening speech, there are plenty of
resources on the Internet for this. Alternatively, you can join other EMI teachers
at an upcoming conference about this where a resources pack would be
provided. Let me also say that there isn’t one set strict way of doing MUN. There
are many variants of MUN based on the readiness and needs of learners This
is good because it gives educators the flexibility to design MUN in a way that
suits their course. Accordingly, you can sit back and relax and enjoy learning
about MUN.
Lets take look then at the types of people that name up the conference. First
the people. The students who are acting as delegates of different countries will
of course be attending. In addition to them, you could include a keynote speaker.
The keynote speaker should be relevant to the topic and his status should add
to the reputation of the conference. As such, it is important to find a good
keynote speaker. Like i said, the keynote speaker is your choice, but you
definitely don’t want to forget to include these two people: the chair and co chair.
These two people make up what is called the Dias or what I prefer calling the
Presidium.
What tasks do they perform? The chairs main task is to facilitate the debate.
The co chair on the other hand acts as the host, takes attendance, and follows
the speakers list and keeps track of delegates performance on the points. For
our MUN, two senior students who were experienced on the MUN served as
the chair and co-chair. But tracking the performance of the delegates has
always been my job especially because my students are highly concerned
about their grades being awarded by teaching assistants or senior students.
Thus, I was in charge of the points rubric. When we started with MUN, I was
the chair of the conference while my TA was the co-chair. But the points was
still in my control.

That’s it for the people then, there’s the Dias made up of the chair and co-chair,
the conference participants called delegates, and the keynote speaker, which
is desired but optional.

The next thing we can look at is the process. There isn’t a set way to do these
conferences but a typical agenda could look something like this:

The co-chair calls the entire house to order and reminds everyone some
important rules to follow. Thereafter the cochair does the roll call by asking
calling the names out of countries to see if they are present and will or will not
be voting. The co-chair will say: Delegates, we will first do the roll call.
Delegates of Argentina? Delegates of Argentina will respond: Present and
voting (Or present and not voting)
After roll call is taken, the co-chair invites the keynote speaker to speak to
attendees (I.e., to make his her speech). After the keynote speaker has spoken,
the cochair invites the chair to make his speech. Once the chair is done, the co-
chair proceeds to the speakers list and invites countries to deliver their opening
speech. At the end of each countries opening speech, delegates are invited to
ask questions or provide their own opinions. In addition to the delagate to whom
the question or opinion is targeted, other countries may jump in to give their
opinions or state their questions. With so many delegates, this can be a grueling
process and everyone may find the time debate to be short. There are ways of
overcoming this problem. I prefer doing finishing all the opening speeches and
then having all the delegates debate each other instead of following the norm
of opening speech then debate, opening speech then debate, opening speech
then debate right through to the last delegate. I find students get very tired and
lose their interest in debate following this tedious way. But you might have
better luck doing it then me. So feel free to go ahead and give that a try.
Once delegates are finished debating, they can now engage in an unmoderated
caucus. During the unmoderated caucus, delegates are free to walk or roam
around and invite other delegates to join them to jointly write a resolution.
Delegates can of course also choose to sit out the unmoderated caucus and
not join any team leaving it to other delegates to create a resolutions for which
they would finally vote.

Delegates writing a resolution together are called the sponsors. In order for a
resolution to be considered by the floor, it needs at least 20 % of delegates sign
on as either sponsors or signatories. By writing their countries names on a
resolution as signatories, delegates do not affirm that they agree with a
resolution but are merely affirming that they wish the resolution to be heard by
everyone.

Resolutions are eventually voted on and a simple majority is sufficient for a

resolution to be adopted.

Now honestly speaking, for my students I found the process of running the
unmoderated caucus and resolution a bit problematic. So, we did it a bit
differently. After the opening speeches and debates, some main lines of thought
become apparent to me and it was pretty obvious which students were most
forceful in pushing those points. So what I did is i chose those students and
formed three teams to write resolutions for everyone to vote. After the opening
speeches and debates there was a week difference, which was ideal because
the students had at least a week to work on their resolutions. While these
students were writing the resolutions I got the rest of the class to continue
debating in our Facebook group.

In essence this is what my conference looked like:

Keynote speaker
Speech by chair
Opening speeches
Debates
Writing of resolutions
Voting