Help our students think BIG!

The Wicked Festival - based on problem-based learning, research, teamwork and presentation - gives Radford University students outstanding learning opportunities and is rapidly growing each year!

The concept kicks off with faculty assigning their students projects designed to teach them to explore varied avenues to develop potential solutions to some of the world’s most difficult-to-solve public problems – aka: “wicked” problems. Each semester students pick a topic and work in groups for several weeks conducting research – that could be anything from finding sources in publications to talking with community leaders. They then write papers, give in-class presentations, and design a poster to concisely present their work at the festival near the end of the semester.

This year, 20 faculty members assigned wicked problems to their classes. That’s more than three times greater than the amount in the fall of 2021, when the inaugural Wicked Festival occupied only a few rooms on the first floor of Heth Hall.

More than 570 students participated in this fall’s Wicked Festival, held in November in the new Artis Center for Adaptive Innovation and Creativity. Students from 23 courses over six colleges showed their work through elaborate posters while also engaging in conversations about their extensive research with fellow students, faculty, university administrators and others who walked through the event.

The College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences invites private support to advance and enhance this conference-style event for our students.

Political science professor and chief organizer of the event, Paige Tan said, “The Wicked Festival is becoming more than a once-a-semester event. It's become a movement to center public problem-solving in the student learning experience at Radford. Wicked Fest builds skills in problem-solving, teamwork and public presentation.”

The Wicked Festival and associated initiatives were motivated by Paul Hanstedt's book “Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World.”  Tan and other Radford faculty have taken the concept a step further, creating a wicked problems academic minor as well as a student Wicked Problems Society and a Wicked Problems Toolkit, a student-curated website that holds numerous artifacts and resources for understanding and teaching about wicked problems. Students from the Wicked Society have presented their work and offered workshops at United Nations conferences in Lisbon, Portugal and Berlin, Germany. These experiences empower our students them to become agents of solution to the world's toughest challenges.