RADFORD — In only four semesters, Radford University’s Wicked Festival has grown from a political science and philosophy classroom project with a little over 30 participants, to a campus-wide event involving more than 400 students and six of the university’s eight colleges.
The festival is designed to hone students’ problem-solving skills, allowing them to not only bring attention to major problems, both worldwide and local, but to try to work out practical ways to solve them.
Chapman Rackaway, the chair of Radford’s political science department, said the presentations, which allow students to appoint themselves as authorities on specific issues, play a key role in helping students think practically about the problems they choose to work on.
“You could come up with really infeasible solutions, and say, ‘well, this is the only way to fix it,’ but it’s never going to happen,” Rackaway said. “By grounding them in making something that has a reasonable chance of being done, gives them a constraint that prepares them to take this out into the real world.”
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The festival gets its name from a book, “Creating Wicked Students,” by Paul Hanstedt. The book’s conceit is that, to better prepare students for solving large-scale problems, educators should design programs to help students to think of themselves, and present themselves, as an authority on a given subject.
The festival was first conceived by two professors in the political science department, Paige Tan and Tay Keong Tan. It was first held in 2021, after a book group at Radford read Hanstedt’s book.
Paige Tan, who handles much of the work of organizing the festival, said that the event has changed the way students work in the classroom as well as in the run-up to the festival.
“It’s really taken the students much further than they were going before,” Tan said. “They would do a presentation and then go, ‘Oh, I did that, I’ll never have to think about it again,’ but there’s something about having to be the authority, about standing up here and having to defend it to every passer-by, that really seems to help students to understand problem-solving, critical thinking and, most of all, confidence.”
During the fifth Wicked Festival, held Thursday, all three floors of Kyle Hall were taken up by students with poster board presentations, grappling with questions as diverse as U.S.-Saudi relations, racial bias in the U.S. criminal justice system, environmental impacts of the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, and many others.
In fact, there were more than 200 presentations given at the festival this semester.
Students spent the evening rotating in and out of designated presentation areas, with poster board stands filling rooms and lining the halls of the building to accommodate all of the presenters.
When the presentations are over, Tan asks the students to draft policy memos for their proposed solutions, which could be sent to lawmakers and other influential people. This wasn’t part of the original festival, but Tan said the students immediately took to it.
“That’s the cool thing,” Tan said. “I’m asking more of them now, and they’re stepping up for it.”
Additionally, faculty involvement has grown exponentially since the festival started, from the two professors to 15 working to put on the festival each semester.
Tan said that the growth of the festival in such a short time is a testament to its effectiveness — and its popularity.
“It’s growing because the faculty like it, and it’s growing because the students like it,” Tan said.
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