Radford students research, offer solutions to world’s wicked problems

It keeps growing and growing and growing.

Each year, Radford University’s Wicked Festival gets a little bigger as more faculty assign their students projects designed to teach them various avenues in which to explore and develop potential solutions to some of the world’s most difficult-to-solve public problems.

AKA: wicked problems.

That’s how each semester’s Wicked Festival begins. 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.

More than 570 students participated in this fall’s Wicked Festival, held Nov. 4 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.

Talking about their projects was the “fun part” of the festival, said Tristan Burt, a sophomore management major from Virginia Beach, Virginia. “I’ve had fun talking to different people who come by and ask us questions.” Burt, along with classmates and fellow sophomores Wes Conners of Vienna, Virginia, and Samuel Bowman of Marion, Virginia, tackled the challenging question of how to balance environmental preservations and economic growth in the City of Radford.

In all, at least 600 people from all over campus played a role in the event, including students, faculty, administrators, visiting faculty from another university and community partners.

“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,” said political science Professor Paige Tan, a chief organizer of the event. “Wicked Fest builds skills in problem-solving, teamwork and public presentation.”

Those are skills “we’ll have for life,” said Bowman, a finance major.

Radford University offers an education and opportunities like the Wicked Festival that encourages active participation, challenges students from the outset and provides early access to industry-aligned opportunities. As early as their freshman year, students get hands-on experience, including valuable internships and research opportunities. Every Radford student can engage in career-driven experiences that connect them meaningfully to their future profession.

The festival is a product of Radford’s Wicked Problems Initiative, which is based on decades of research aimed toward engaging students in research that will develop their problem-solving skills as they examine some of the world’s most complex problems.

In addition to the festival, many students are involved with the campus wicked initiative.

Earlier this year, Radford received a grant from The Educating Character Institute at Wake Forest University to support the fast-growing initiatives at Radford.

The grant, titled “Cultivating Virtues for Solving Wicked Problems,” includes funding for faculty development for wicked problems pedagogy, an outside reviewer for Radford’s Wicked Problems initiatives, support for the Wicked Festival and student and faculty travel, and funding for creating a Wicked Festival-type event at the summer residential Governor’s School held on campus.

Radford’s Wicked Festival and 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 initiative a step further, creating a wicked problems minor on campus 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. The past two years, students from the Wicked Society have presented their work and offered workshops at United Nations conferences in Lisbon, Portugal and Berlin, Germany.

“Solving public problems requires values and dispositions that position students well as engaged citizens and in-demand employees,” Tan said. “Our wicked students are resilient and confident. They have empathy and care for others. They are fired with hope that public problems can be solved and that they can be agents of their solution.”

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

“We’ve outgrown a lot of spaces,” said the chair of the Department of Political Science, Professor Chapman Rackaway. “First, it was Heth, and then we outgrew Kyle Hall, and now we’ve had to move to this larger space in the Artis Center.

“It just keeps growing!” Rackaway continued, looking and smiling out at the sea of students and posters.

Participating in the event was “a great opportunity,” said Megan Moezie of Fairfax, Virginia, who was participating in her third festival. She worked with sophomore history major Delaney Woody of Charleston, West Virginia, researching solutions to “The Threat of AI to the Literary, Artistic and Creative Professionals.”

“Even though I have nothing to do with art or AI in my field,” the junior social work major said, “I think it’s great that I can learn about these different topics.”

Throughout the evening, judges talked with teams nominated for awards and later concluded which projects were most deserving of the Wickie Awards.

Honors were given for outstanding presentations, distinguished research, impactful solutions and rising stars, which is designed for students participating in the festival via 100-level courses.

Below is a list of fall 2024 Wicked Festival awards winners with the name of the projects. Their supervising faculty members are listed in parentheses.

Outstanding Presentation

GOLD: 5-3 A Game of Chance: The Contexts Surrounding Impoverished Hispanic Immigrants in Virginia, by Jojo Turcios, Taylor Allen, Jan Diaz, Lily McConkey (Steven Fesmire)
SILVER: 5-47 Virginians over Money: Virginia’s Corruption in Politics and How It Takes the Voice of the People and Elected Officials Away, by Riley Johnson, Jack Tull, Michael Kautzmann (Paige Tan)
BRONZE: 5-44 Stirrup the Silence: Investigating Invasive Feminine Procedures, by Evergreene Dietz, Kaley Hagan, Emma Snead (Jessica Mattox)

Distinguished Research

GOLD: 6-27 Sexual Violence in the Military, by Jonas Miller, Danae Bowyer, Jack Braun (Tay Keong Tan)
SILVER: 6-63 The Dark Net: Ungoverned Platform for Illicit Content, Trafficking, and Terrorist Financing, by Mel Cornils, Paige Olson (Tay Keong Tan)
BRONZE: 5-78 Fool Me Twice: The Internet and Elder Fraud, by Owen Saunders (Zehui Dai)
HONORABLE MENTION: 6-55 Are You Ever Truly Alone: Lack of Privacy in an AI Dominated World, by Sean Anderson, Barrick Mogel, Ebenezer Morkeh, Abby Sikora (Margaret Konkel)

Impactful Solution

GOLD: 5-14 Factory Farming: The Globalization of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, by Zora Comer, Erin Torres (Tay Keong Tan)
SILVER: 6-36 Ultra-Processed Foods that Kill People and Destroy the Planet, by Katherine Falvey, Abigail Stuckey, Camren Carter (Tay Keong Tan)
BRONZE: 5-48 Cleaner Currents: Limiting Pollution in the New River, by Luke Harrison, Alex Resnick, Caden Berg (Jessica Mattox)

Rising Star

GOLD: 6-34 How might we help pet owners better afford their pets, by Isabella Lopez, Emily O'Quinn, Thomason Liles, Alexis Thornton, Isabelah Cauley (Luke Liska)
SILVER 6-40 Bridging the Gap: Addressing the Teacher Shortage Crisis, by Ilianna Pena, Shelby Beverly (Joe Wirgau)
BRONZE 6-60 How might people protect themselves from AI, by Megan Cash, Tony Hall, Sean Milshteen, Morgan Jessie (Luke Liska)