The Class Based on Model United Nations

―――The Foreign Affairs Class in the school year 2002―――
Here we introduce our Foreign Affairs Class for the third-year students in the International Course during the school year 2002. This year Daniel Wilcock and I taught for the first term, while Erica Clump and I for the second and the third term. We employed ”Speaking Globally ---English in an International Context---”(Prentice Hall Regents) as our textbook.
This year, from the start to the end, we organized our classes mainly around the Country Report and debating in the form of the Model United Nations Conference. 28 students took part in our FA Class, which made 29 after September as an exchange student to Denmark returned. We divided the students into 9 groups, and had each of the groups represent one of the following countries: Brazil, France, India, Kenya, Korea, Malay, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, USA. We teachers chose the countries, based on the geographic diversity of cultures and religions. Each group was a representative body in the General Assembly of the Model United Nations.
The Foreign Affairs Class has two successive periods a week. At the beginning of the first period, two of representative bodies make their own Country Report. Members of each representative body share three rolls: the Speaker, the Display, and the Handout in their Country Report. We had two rounds of country reports, and asked the students to focus on the geographic information in the first round, and to cover the following five points in their first Country Report: 1) Brief History, 2) Ethnicity / Language, 3) Religion, 4) Weather, 5) Fisheries / Agriculture / Industries. In the Country Report Round II, each representative body present their culture as actively as possible.
The debating section was basically based on the textbook ”Speaking Globally”(SG, hereinafter) SG has 10 units:
Unit 1: International English
Unit 2: International Travel
Unit 3: International Business and Trade
Unit 4: The Environment
Unit 5: Ethnocentrism
Unit 6: World Religions
Unit 7: World Organizations
Unit 8: International Law
Unit 9: International Education
Unit 10: The Future
After the Country Report section, we put up the Warming Up Exercise to have the students acquire some information and related vocabularies in an active style. First the students read the ’Background Reading’ in SG, and then we teachers introduce related vocabularies and provide some activities or quizzes.
About ten minutes before the end of the first period, we introduce the Today’s Topic. Daniel preferred the Today’s Topic offered in the style like “Should immigration be made easier?”, which means in the form to which we can reply either Yes/No or Pro/Con, and we employed the style to the end of this school year. Anyway, the representative bodies start preparing for the Debate Part I. Even during the ten minutes break, some students keep preparing or talking with an ALT on the related issues. The representative bodies keep preparing during the first ten minutes in the second period.
The Debate Part I gets started, and the ambassador to the United Nations from each country delivers their opinion one by one. We demand the students should listen to the other opinions, as much as they concentrate delivering their own. Some students focus only on their speech with paying little attention to the others. That is strongly against our implicit purpose in the Foreign Affairs Class. We need dialogues in this world, not plural monologues. We, however, tell the students the strategic importance of paying careful attention to the different opinions. They should try to pick up some demands or ideas in the other statements, so as to make their own in the Debate Part II more appealing to the other representative bodies, which makes it more likely to form majority around their standpoint in the final voting. So after the Intermission, during which the representative bodies prepare for the next speech, we start the Debate Part II. At the end of the period, we have the final voting for Yes/No or Pro/Con (including Undecided). It seems a topic which leads to the divided or split voting result will make the debate more interesting.
　SG can provide themes and topics only for the first half of the school year. As we should make up themes and topics by ourselves, Erica and I chose to have students think of them by themselves. The students also asked for changing their countries to broaden their aspects. When we approached to the end of the first half of the school year, September, we started choosing countries first. This time we let the students decide their countries, though we did not forget to remember them that the balance among regions and cultures was very important. First each student named favorite(?) countries, and we listed them all. They voted and chose 9 new countries. Luckily enough, the choice had diversity, thanks to the students’ sense of proportion. The countries are: Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Singapore, and South Africa.
“Let's make up ‘Today's Topic’!”, this is where and how we started our second half. Each student pick up two or three themes for their interests. They talk about them, and reduce the number into nine. One theme will be given to each of the new representative bodies by lot, and they start thinking of a topic for their theme. The themes and topics are
Today's Topics in the Second Half
1) Food
Should food waste be taxed?
2) Marriage
Should gay marriage be allowed in each country?
3) Animal
Should each government ban animal tests even for medical experiment?
4) Music
Should each country stop illegal music copying?
5) Sports
Should the UN donate the place where everyone can play sports?
6) Drugs
Should UN recommend each country to make common regulations of drugs?
7) Trade
Should we extend globalism in world trade?
8) Environment
Should each country spend the money to think about practice measure of global warming?
9) Terrorism
Should the international court decide who are the terrorists?
We organize classes almost the same way as in the first half. We, however, lack a textbook which we base on, and had a little bit hard time preparing introductory materials which will provide the students some background knowledge and related vocabularies. We also try to do the introduction actively.
I would like to introduce some voices of the participants.
One student who had not been interested in the world news says: “One day, when I was reading a newspaper, I noticed that I could understand the problems, and felt very close to the countries than ever. I thought that was the Foreign Affairs’ classes’ effect.”, explaining the start of her interest in the topics. Another student writes about the change of her view on developing countries: “Before taking Foreign Affairs classes, I thought that the developing countries are only poor, lacking food, having a lot of refugees and so on. But after taking Foreign Affairs’ classes, I knew the developing countries have high culture, traditional religion, traditional clothes and so on. These things are very interesting for me.”
“Each country has different characteristic. It is very wonderful. That is the　”world”. Sadly enough, we don’t understand it. There are fictional images of foreign countries in our minds. We see others through the lens. I found the misunderstanding, and discovered new aspects of the countries in this class. I could remove the lens.” These words remind me the happiness and luckiness that I can teach this unique class “Foreign Affairs”.