State and Local Politics professor Leonard Williams has found great success teaching at Manchester College and has used an assignment within the course to create much of that success for both himself and his students.

             
This assignment, referred to as “Camelot,” has been a part of Williams’s class for the past 25 years as a means of giving students a chance to have experimental learning through the simulation of real-life politics.

             
The assignment involves a role-playing simulation in which for every third week of the course, the class is turned into the city of Camelot, and state and local government policies for this city are handled and organized. Some students in the class are assigned  the role of being members of the City Council, which is an area of primary focus in dealing with the city structure.

Participants of the City Council deal with a city the size of approximately 150,000 people, confronting issues of crime, moral and social ethics, financial matters such as trying to meet the budget, land development, and simply protecting the well being of the citizens residing in the city.

             
There are 40 students participating in the assignment, and those students not included in the City Council are grouped into different job roles surrounding the city. There are students who represent business developments, a newspaper scribe who writes columns concerning political issues around the city, and a mayor in charge of much of the city’s financial and political status.

             
“This assignment is designed for the students to practice politics in the second half of the semester after learning about city politics in the first half” Williams said. “I’m strictly an observer and the students are in charge,”

             
And like any other city, passion and drama of everyday politics is carried out in the simulation. In this particular class, there have been instances in which the mayor was recalled because of poor performance and an adult book store was even torn down so that a massage parlor could be built, causing great controversy within the city.

All of these issues and confrontations are dealt with on a day-to-day basis as students in the class often get the opportunity to voice out and speak their minds on how policies and regulations should be handled. “This assignment creates a lot of drama which is exactly what politics is centered around,” Williams said. “Not only do they get to learn about government regulations and standards, but they also get an in-depth look at what it’s like to be involved in difficult decisions that state and local government officials deal with on a daily basis.”

The assignment has individual and group elements for the students in which each student is assigned a role in the city, and then is required to learn about that particular role in the textbook used for the course. The book deals with two parts; the first covering information on how local government works with the second part involving the entire role playing scenes of Camelot, the section in which the students act out and simulate.

             
The city of Camelot faces racial and diversity matters and truly confronts the whole “city” atmosphere in which any problem could easily arise. And because the unordinary often occurs in a city of 150,000 people, the emphasis for the students as political figures is flexibility and patience. Good politicians are able to deal with more than one issue at a time and are also able to handle criticism from its citizens.

This simulation can really serve as an eye-opener to the students as to what they may have to face if their lives direct them towards politics. “The students bring ideas from other classes as far as how to run a city, and that creates a level of excitement in the assignment,” Williams said. “The students get to take a break from taking notes and actually get a hands-on experience in dealing with real politics.”

             
Everything regarding the assignment is realistic, as there is even a mock election for City Council members at the beginning of the assignment, in which students get the chance to vote for their classmates based on their campaigning and speaking qualities when discussing different political issues.

             
The Camelot assignment centers around disagreement, controversy, drama and more controversy as politics within a city are confronted and resolved. Decisions must be made and actions must be taken, making the assignment a reality for future political student candidates.

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