Coaching Winning Model United Nations Teams: A Teacher's Guide

4. Scheduling

21 Where to Go After you have introduced yourselves to each other and you have laid down a few goals for the team, you should also include in your first meeting a discussion of where the team will go for its first conference(s). You can pick any month during the school year—you’ll probably find an organization within driving distance that will be hosting a conference (the United Nations Association of the United States [UNAUSA ] hosts an online calendar of MUN conferences). Pick conferences that will provide a learning experience for your students. This means you’re looking for conferences that promise college chairs and have a solid record for producing excellent background guides. Those conferences will draw the MUN clubs that are serious about MUNing, and those are the conferences that will reinforce what you’ve been teaching and allow your kids to see firsthand the best delegates in action. Nothing will improve your team more than competing against the best MUN clubs. While September is a bit early to start on the conference circuit—schools are just starting, and teams have not have much time to get organized—you can take this opportunity to run scrimmages within the team to give your students practice in a conference setting. You might even invite local schools with a few veterans to stop by to give your students an idea of the level of competition they will face. At this stage, you do not need to burden your students with researching two to five topics (which you will normally find at conferences), writing position papers, etc. Let them pick whatever country they would like (for scrimmages, it is okay for students to choose the same country), and give them all the same topic and same committee for this practice. You should draft a short background guide on the topic, offering a statement of the issue(s), some previous UN attempts to solve the problem(s), suggestions for further research, and some questions that will guide their deliberations. Here’s a background guide we have used in our early scrimmages: 4 Scheduling Welcome to our first practice. At most conferences, you’ll have on average about two weeks to research your country, the topic(s), and your country’s positions on the topics. In this case, we’d like you to not worry about such time pressure, and come in confident of your knowledge. For our first scrimmage, which we’ll hold on Thursday, September 21, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., we’ll discuss global terrorism. It’s a topic on which virtually every country has something reasonably substantive to say—after all, every diplomat is potentially in the terrorists’ sights. You can explore pretty much whatever aspect of terrorism you want. Here are a few things you might want to consider: • Should the UN get involved in specific terrorist campaigns? Does, say, the Sri Lankan conflict merit UN mediation? Palestine? Kashmir? Colombia? You name it, virtually every region has some terrorist group, however small, that you might wish to discuss. • What more can the UN do regarding al Qaeda? • Should the UN create its own independent antiterrorist force to track down terrorists and bring them before the International Criminal Court? • What constitutes state support to terrorists? Are some types of support more worrisome than others? What should the UN do, if anything, to outlaw such activities? • Can the UN do anything to remedy the causes of terrorism? What are those causes? • There are numerous anti-terrorist conventions (international agreements ), be they global, regional, bilateral, etc. Do we need any more? Should the UN consider setting up a review conference to examine the effectiveness of one or more of these conventions? Below is a list of the global conventions (this does not include UN Security Council or General Assembly resolutions). Make sure you know which ones your country has joined, which ones you’re not in, and why. – Convention on Offenses and Certain Other Acts Committed on Board Aircraft (often referred to as the Tokyo Convention, 1963) – Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft (Hague Convention, 1970) – Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation (Montreal Convention, 1971) – Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons (1973) 22 Coaching Winning Model UN Teams – Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of...