MUN- Model United Nations
FerMUN, the Model United Nations club at Ferney Voltaire, is one of the few bi-lingual Model United Nations clubs in the world. It has organised international model UN conferences in Geneva, a highly appropriate and accommodating city, with the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the United Nations Palais through UNOG, the WTO, the World Meteorological Organisation, CERN and the International Telecommunications Union being organisations who have hosted 600 to 700 pupils from around the world. The local links this has built are invaluable.
This dynamic club is co-ordinated and led with great energy by Mme Florence Baudry within the Lycée and there are organisational, pedagogical and professional links with the ENP which date back from the founding of the club by Mr Doug Sammons, a former ENP teacher. To him we are eternally grateful. This partnership means that each year many places are offered by the club to English National pupils, current figures being that 38% of the membership is from English National and 38% of new 2nde recruits also are in our Programme. This is a privilege for us at ENP and a service to the club, as this recruitment outcome ensures the quality and success of its bi-lingual status, something that has made this a popular conference within the MUN community. In addition, pupils from the club attend various conferences around the world during the academic year.
Each school which attends the conference (and such schools come from as far away as Nairobi or Los Angeles) send a delegation. Delegates are given nations to represent on a range of the UN committees where the focus of debate is linked to the annual conference theme. The aim is to learn about countries and politics and international relations by adopting other countries’ viewpoints in serious and committed role play within the lobbying and debating procedures and protocols of the UN. To prepare, pupils complete high octane, autonomous group work and develop areas of argument and clauses and sub-clauses for debate. Non-delegates choose instead to be members of serious and quasi-professional translation teams, or dynamic interpretation teams, using facilities for “live” interpretation and fully exploiting and applying the linguistic gifts of our pupils in real world contexts. A high-level press and publications team is formed and each year the bar is raised in the quality, tone, efficiency and usefulness of the pupil generated documentation.
The experience teaches students and delegates the formal language and intervention protocols of UN debates around realistic and burningly relevant political issues, turbo charges the process of applying persuasive and analytical skills to research and writing tasks in English within ENP and transforms the quality and power of university applications and personal statements of participating pupils, especially for high level social science degrees around the world.
The club is supported directly by the ALA-ELP parents’ committee and the Programme contact with it is through Alan Ackroyd who has been a Director since its inception. All in all, it is a spectacular, significant and unique educational experience. Please tour the website below to get a sense of the scale, scope and value of what the club offers. fermun.org/en/
