Students in the Santiago Canyon College Model U.N. team won the award for Outstanding Delegation at the recent Model U.N. Conference in New York — the highest award given. They competed against thousands of students from universities all over the world while practicing their skills of collaboration and communication.
“It’s a really big achievement for our students,” said Cale Crammer, associate professor of political science, who has coordinated the program at SCC for seven years. “The Delegation Award that they won is spectacular. I feel really good for our students, that they were able to reach that accomplishment. There were also some individual awards and some partnership awards that really stand out because it’s difficult to win those writing awards –
the quality of papers that are written at the conference is very, very high.”
The Model U.N. teams from SCC have won this award five times — in 2018, 2019, 2021, 2023 and now in 2024.
The challenge for students of Model U.N. is to study and collaborate to find solutions to problems in nations around the world. At the international competition in New York, the SCC team was assigned to represent Honduras and had to find solutions to complex problems Hondurans face, including climate change, refugees and development issues.
“Honduras presents us with some interesting challenges for my students when one looks into the country’s history and the country’s positions,” said Crammer. “I think that that’s a big value of Model U.N. — we ask students to put themselves in the shoes of somebody else, to think from their perspective, to think from their point of view. There’s a rich tapestry of countries throughout the world that have different interests and different perspectives.”
The Model U.N. class at SCC embodies some of the newest trends in education, Crammer said. “It is really student-centric, student-driven, and focuses on active learning,” he explained. Collaborating helps students develop professional skills as well as communication and interpersonal skills, which will help them ace a job interview, work with colleagues and collaborate in teams, he said.
“We certainly model the United Nations, and students have to get into the role of thinking like diplomats,” Crammer said. “But more concretely, students give a lot of speeches in class. They engage in deliberative forums where there are no winners and losers. It’s about thinking about what’s possible for us to do as members of the global community to address some of the most difficult issues.”
Surprisingly, most of the Model U.N. students are not political science majors but rather STEM students who want to be able to speak and write well and be comfortable in social and professional situations.
At the New York competition, students got to sharpen those speaking and writing skills. For some, it was the first time they had traveled out of the state or stayed in a hotel in the heart of Manhattan.
“On the first day in New York, they go into a grand ballroom, and there were thousands of people in this room,” Crammer said. He instructed his students to go around the room, introduce themselves to people and start conversations with strangers.
“There were delegations from Japan, from Ecuador, from China, from Middle Eastern countries like the United Arab Emirates,” Crammer said. “We had a large number of colleges from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy. These students come from everywhere across the world.”
Crammer accompanied the 18 students to the New York competition, as he has done for nearly 20 years. “I think all my students would say hands down it was something they’ll always remember. They get to go to the United Nations and hear from diplomats. The last three secretary generals of the United Nations have all spoken to teams of mine.”
The Model U.N. program is designed to broaden awareness and build confidence.
Crammer was in the Model U.N. program as a student at Cal State San Marcos and during graduate school at UC Riverside. In the beginning, he was terrified of speaking in front of people, but, eventually, he could speak in front of thousands.
“It transformed my life,” he said.
“It teaches students to be citizens of the world,” he added. “I tell them that it is a humanistic endeavor, and it is a belief that citizenship must take on a more global perspective.”
Crammer’s students already grasp this.
“I think they see themselves more than just understanding the importance of being globally minded for employment reasons,” he said. “I think they see that today’s problems don’t have passports. Climate change doesn’t stop at the border between the United States and Mexico, so they have to think about issues that cut across the way that we might traditionally think about politics.”
