Bringing the World to Baltimore - Adapting Town-Gown Civic Engagement to Covid

For 18 years, Towson University (USA) has run a Model United Nations conference program for local high school students. This version is free for all participants, with its founding ethos centered on equality of access for co-curricular global learning, academic skill development, and college exposure opportunities for students regardless of their families’ socio-economic status. Located just outside of Baltimore, Maryland, USA, the program serves high schoolers who would otherwise not be able to participate in Model UN due to the high costs of most of these programs. Usually held on the Towson campus, we have transitioned in 2020-2021 to a fully virtual format, which brought many challenges, such as technology access, restrictions regarding working with underage students online, and substantially increased staff needs and preparation time to operate the program. A three-day program between November and March, it also involves university students in every aspect. A second facet of the program is a course for university students, Civic Engagement and International Affairs, which runs in the fall semester and works with the conference Fall Training Day. Again, covid brought challenges on the college student side as well, as budgets for the program were cut, technological access was uncertain, and normal modes of interaction were disrupted. This paper explains what adaptations were made, how challenges were overcome, and which unforeseen benefits may be carried over to the time when in-person meetings can resume on this scale. A review of lessons learned, demographics of high school and college participants, and post-conference survey data will be provided. Overall, we hope to highlight how the covid period can be used to shake up and improve civic engagement education, academic skills, and global learning for both college and high school students. This paper highlights disparities in civic engagement learning opportunities between students from different racial and economic backgrounds. As several scholars have documented (Asal and Blake 2006; Engel, Pallas, and Lambert 20217; Leib and Ruppel 2020), simulations as a form of experiential learning are regarded as highly effective teaching tools for both content and skills. As Leib and Ruppel (2020) note, “…active learning techniques have a positive effect on students’ learning outcomes.” However, co-curricular active learning programs and civic engagement programs are often far more accessible to students from higher economic families, and higher income also tends to correlate with race (Pew 2018). This program proposes a way to increase accessibility for both college students (McCartney 2005) and high school students, even with greater hurdles presented by covid restrictions.