The Virginia Government Simulation

The Virginia Government Simulation

Some of the most important civic learning happens not in a classroom but in the moment a student realizes that democratic process is something they can actually do — not just study. The Virginia Government Simulation was built on that conviction, and it has grown into one of the most distinctive experiential civic education programs in the Commonwealth.

Origins

The Virginia Government Simulation began as a conversation about what was missing from civic education at the collegiate level. Simulations of legislative process had existed in various forms for decades, but most were contained within a single institution, limited to a single department, and disconnected from the actual physical and procedural reality of legislative work. The question that drove the founding of VGS was more ambitious: what would it look like to bring students from across Virginia together, on the actual floor of the Virginia House of Delegates, to practice the full arc of the legislative process under authentic parliamentary rules?

I co-founded VGS with that question as the organizing principle, and the program held its inaugural session on the floor of the Virginia General Assembly in October 2024. What began as a concept became, within its first year, an annual event with institutional presence, faculty leadership, and a growing reputation among Virginia colleges and universities as a model for how civic education can transcend the boundaries of a single campus.

What VGS Does

The Virginia Government Simulation is a statewide mock legislature in which student delegates from participating Virginia institutions draft, debate, amend, and vote on legislation using the actual rules and procedures of the Virginia General Assembly. Students do not simply role-play — they research genuine policy questions, write bills that reflect real legislative drafting conventions, engage in floor debate under parliamentary procedure, and experience the negotiation and compromise that characterize actual legislative work.

The setting matters. Conducting the simulation on the floor of the House of Delegates is not a logistical convenience — it is a pedagogical choice. Students who stand at a delegate's podium, address a presiding officer, and watch their amendment succeed or fail on a recorded vote have an embodied experience of democratic process that no classroom exercise can fully replicate. The physical environment signals that what they are doing is real, that the skills they are developing matter, and that the institutions they are practicing within are ones they have the right and the responsibility to engage.

Program Development and Leadership

As an Executive Board member and co-founder, I have been involved in every dimension of VGS development — from securing space at the General Assembly to building the parliamentary procedure training materials that prepare students to participate effectively, to developing the constitution-drafting workshop that gives students ownership over the simulation's governing rules. I have also worked to integrate VGS into the curricular and co-curricular fabric of participating departments, connecting the simulation to course learning outcomes in political science, public policy, and civic engagement programs across the state.

The program has been supported by the American Political Science Association and Pi Sigma Alpha, which provided grant funding for the simulation in its inaugural year — an early signal that the model has resonance beyond Virginia. I presented on the program's design and development at both the American Democracy Project Annual Summit and the American Political Science Association Teaching and Learning Conference in 2025, and co-authored a peer-reviewed article on VGS and career readiness published in the Journal of Political Science Education in 2026.

That combination — practitioner co-founder, grant recipient, conference presenter, and published scholar on the same program — reflects an approach to program development that treats civic education as both an administrative and an intellectual project. VGS is not just a program I run. It is a program I have studied, assessed, written about, and continued to improve based on evidence.

Why VGS Matters for Higher Education

Programs like VGS represent exactly the kind of high-impact, cross-institutional, community-connected work that regional comprehensive universities should be doing but rarely do at scale. The simulation builds skills — research, writing, public speaking, parliamentary procedure, negotiation — that are genuinely transferable across careers. It creates connections between students from different institutions and different backgrounds who would never otherwise meet. It demonstrates to the Virginia General Assembly and to the broader public that higher education is invested in cultivating the next generation of engaged citizens and civic leaders.

For a dean building a college's external profile and community engagement portfolio, VGS offers a model for what is possible when faculty take an idea seriously enough to build institutional infrastructure around it. It required relationships with the General Assembly, coordination across institutions, curriculum development, assessment design, external funding, and scholarly documentation. It is, in miniature, a demonstration of what comprehensive academic leadership looks like when it operates at the intersection of teaching, scholarship, and public engagement.

The simulation runs every fall. The floor of the House of Delegates fills with student delegates. Bills are introduced, amended, debated, and decided. And students who arrived uncertain of their own capacity to participate in democratic life leave knowing they can.