Your Excellencies, President Yang Neng-Shu, Director Liu Wei Te, fellow professors, and distinguished guests,

It is my singular honor to address you on how we can build great solidarity for change through general education. I shall begin with three stories to exemplify how General Education has become a window through which I have built bridges:
The first of these concerns my need to foster in my students’ life education skills. Four years ago, we embarked on a program called the Model United Nations, a simulation of the United Nations, where, as you all know, young people imagine that they are delegates of countries who will be meeting at a conference to resolve a global crisis. Their roles are important because they are told that billions of lives in the world depend on their decision-making power. They are the new diplomat on the job, they are aware of what the previous diplomat has brought to the UN, but he has been replaced by them because the president of their country wants a better solution on his desk: one that is in line with his foreign policy objectives and promotes their country’s national security and interests and also one that brings a solution to the global world. It is a careful line that they must thread because billions of lives rests on their proposals and decision. Billions of lives! Your excellencies, if you had ever seen a great spark of light rise up from a young man’s soul into his eyes, then it was on that day.
The effort involved extensive research of countries, extensive research of topics, and a well-written position paper on what each country wants the committee to focus on and how each country sees its role in solving this global problem. Eventually, a public speech is delivered, campaigning occurs, behind-the-scenes diplomacy happens, and a full-on debate and discussion occurs before a resolution can be reached. For the young man and woman, suddenly brought on two the world stage, his hopes and desires, his thoughts and feelings, his entire being is respected and valued and he finds great pride in rediscovering his inner worth and in being connected with it. For the world, it means a person with greater understanding and an urge to learn and grow, someone with heightened empathy, and someone who shows great regard and respect for others and a belief in their growth.
Efforts like the Model United Nations are a glimpse into the world we inhabit here. So let me turn your attention to a different effort. When young people have an awareness and an urge to shape their world better, it becomes easier to point them into further directions. So last year, a group of students and myself became absorbed in this one critical question: how can we create a buzz in our community regarding future energy. The group of students I was dealing with were engineering students. Hard on fact, dry on feelings. So we began talking about an environmental problem in our midst and asked them how they felt about it. To be clear about that environmental problem, there was a broken sewer nearby a kindergarten caused by construction work and the kids studying in that kindergarten were being exposed to not just the ugly smells coming from the sewer but also all the different viruses coming along with the sewer. Engineering boys and girls – hard on facts but dry on emotions. But tell them a story like this and it evokes shock and concern and springs the young man and woman who was otherwise absorbed in his textbook of theories or facts and who was living in his world of calculations into action. He suddenly wants to do something; he wants to stand up for his environment. So we decided to create a little newsletter to talk about future energy problems and opportunities. We went out into our local community to collect the stories from our community members, we interviewed government officials, we met industry experts, we spoke to scholars, and we also spoke to the children and their teachers. As we were collecting perspectives, we were creating conversations among different people and we were bringing engineering to the world and the world to the engineering class. I am not an engineer, by the way. I am an English teacher working in the General Education Center where we talk about things like Philosophy, History, Community, Culture, Psychology, Music and where we use tools like Story to create bonds and relationships and build community.
The third story I’d like to share with you is something sweet because literally it is about sugar, but to be clear this is an enfolding story, a story in its making. Some students of mine are very interested in baking. They like making cookies and bread for friends and even their teachers. If it’s your birthday, you’ll be sure to get Lily’s cookies. If it’s teacher’s day, Natalie will surprise you with her cookies. It could be just an ordinary day, and if you’re lucky, you could be part of their cookie-tasting tests. They’re joyful, happy and passionate people these bakers and they seem to love and care about their relationships. They like their friends, teachers, and family members and they love their hometown and the world as well. They see everything through the lens of their freshly baked cookies and through sugar. So we decided to gather these young people and ask them how they could bring the idea of story and conversation to their cookies. We specifically looked at the idea of cultural memory—what do we want people to remember that they might be forgetting and how could the cookies convey this. The result was this idea: let’s make a boxes of cookies with particular themes. For example, the homework box would have common phrases on them that we usually use such as “Did you do your homework?”, “Time to sleep”, “Homework for the Mind”, “I love thinking”, “Facts and Figures but also Story”. But we’ve also come up with themes that revolve around relationships, like mother-daughter relationships, father-son relationships, and other kinds of relationships. As our story is enfolding, we are realizing and achieving social entrepreneurship: the creation of a business that in its essence works for the people. It is an entrepreneurship that is also growing with the people. We are forming bridges with other professors, industry members, and local community members to jointly construct the story of our cookies.
Your Excellencies, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology has achieved several awards because of its commitment to the Sustainable Goals of Development, including the Taiwan Corporate Sustainability Award, World Class Ranking of 101-200 on several SDGs. Along with that, YunTech was ranked among the top 8 for Teaching Strategies” in 2020 and “Technology Digital Innovation”in 2021 in THE Awards Asia competition.
But I believe the awards are merely mirror reflections of what we value most in education. We value the fact that our youth have awareness, awareness of their own and others circumstances and how context shapes perspective. We value that they bring the local context- the feelings and stories and concerns of the different people- to the hard and dry facts and figures they learn in their textbooks so that they can construct the knowledge they learn with the community. We should be establishing bridges with each other and working together to provide lots of opportunities for students to get involved in this world and to use their knowledge and language and cross-cultural intelligence to communicate with others to produce profound change for the world. We have never been a traditional university. We’ve always strived with business, industry and government to inspire our students to use their knowledge to get more socially connected with the world and its full diversity. Finally, we value social entrepreneurship, the kind of entrepreneurship of young people that we all jointly give birth to and that works with and for our environments and becomes a cultural asset that we all create. In essence, we value the place and role that General Education plays not only in nurturing human values but in bringing real human with real stories to our classrooms.
Your excellencies, we are at the center of this new energy and we are also watching the horizon bend as new opportunities are being created. It is a humbling feature of our world growth today because through participating in this progress we are returning the future that we borrowed to those it belongs to—the youth.

Thank you.