Political Science Educator: volume 28, issue 1
Reflections
By Paige Tan (etan3@radford.edu), Heather Keith (hkeith1@radford.edu), and Tay Keong Tan (ttan2@radford.edu)
In response to a book group on Paul Hanstedt’s Creating Wicked Students (2018), Radford University faculty, staff, and students have created a campus-wide Wicked Initiative. The initiative encompasses co-curricular events, curriculum innovations, and even new student associations. It was built from the ground up, based on authentic interdisciplinary cooperation originating with the political science and philosophy departments.
The term “wicked problems” was first described in design and planning literature in the 1970s and has since been used to unpack complex public problems like climate change, food insecurity, and persistent inequality (Rittel and Webber 1973). Features of these complex and intractable problems include that they have varied descriptions based on stakeholder perspectives, no one solution, and no clear way to test solutions for success. There is also no ultimate solution to wicked problems, so the strategy is perhaps better described as problem-mitigation and adaptation, rather than problem-solving.
Hanstedt’s Creating Wicked Students explains how dealing with wicked problems builds the precise skills students today need to develop—whatever their field—to deal with complexity, make themselves authorities, and go from analyzing problems to investigating solutions. Through our campus initiative in wicked problems, students develop their problem-solving, teamwork, oral presentation, and written communication skills. In addition, we see the growth of students’ confidence in their abilities and hopefulness in the face of the many difficult problems our society faces.
From the book group, our Wicked Festival grew in Fall 2021. Starting from a core of classes in political science and philosophy in our College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences, the festival has grown to encompass multiple disciplines, such as biology, criminal justice, design, economics, education, English, marketing, Spanish, and social work. Key offices in faculty development, undergraduate research, and civic engagement have provided crucial support.
Students work to solve tough public problems from their plethora of disciplinary perspectives and present their solutions at each semester’s Wicked Festival. Students in political science have tackled extinction-level events, sought to quash growing White nationalism, fought terrorist groups at home and abroad, combatted campus-based sexual assault, and even strategized how to remove dictators from office. Philosophy students have explored reducing plastic use on campus, improving mental health initiatives in local schools, mitigating food insecurity on campus and in the community, and suggesting renewable energy solutions for campus.
The Wicked Festival is agnostic about how students solve their problems. Students in philosophy classes might use design thinking to tackle the climate crisis. This includes empathizing with stakeholders, defining the problem, ideating potential solutions, developing prototypes, and testing a solution. In our PHIL 115: Wicked Problems course, for example, students learn to understand the needs of stakeholders on campus or in the community or world (empathizing), explore the problems themselves and their intersections with other wicked problems (defining), and posit and assess potential solutions (ideation). While our first-year course experience doesn’t always achieve prototypes or testing, students do make recommendations to leaders and policy makers about potential solutions to develop and test. In this case, our courses are service learning, both in direct volunteer service to the community and in developing recommendations and policy proposals to create more resilient and sustainable communities. A design thinking approach to wicked problems helps participants to develop skills, a transformative mindset, and collaborative relationships with partners and stakeholders (Lake, et.al., 2022).
Many political science classes use the Harvard Kennedy School’s Policy Analysis Exercise[1] approach to offer policy recommendations to a government or non-profit client. This involves problem definition, development of criteria, weighing alternatives according to the criteria, and arriving at recommendations. This year, biology joined the festival, with BIOL 112: Biology and Social Justice students using the tools of hard science to examine plant species’ resilience to a drought- and heat-wracked world.
In 2023-2024, 725 students participated across the year’s two festivals. Most students present at the festival through posters, but others have used short videos, readings of banned books, and audio clips. The key to success of the Wicked Festival, its secret sauce, is students talking to other students about their problems and solutions. Students have reported being amazed that they are taken seriously as problem solvers. They have remarked on how their confidence grows with each passing festival. Our faculty observes student problem solving improve in real time as they iterate their presentations and improve with each try.
In addition to studying problems and solutions, some classes in both political science and philosophy require students to take at least some actions in the real world to address their problem. Students in POSC 130: Changing the World have lobbied legislators, cleaned up campus, held consciousness-raising discussions, and contributed to the creation of momentum toward a campus-wide food security initiative. Students in PHIL 115: Wicked Problems have sent policy proposals to campus and community leaders, written a cookbook for foods found in local food banks, held awareness campaigns on campus, participated in local river clean-ups, and shared survey information with administrators regarding interest in campus environmental improvements. As we move forward, developing our channels to impact the real world, such as in a follow-on wicked problems experience like a higher-level wicked problems class, is a priority.
We are graduating this year our first students from what we call the “wicked generation,” students who have participated in many, if not most, of the Wicked Festivals across the last three years. Asked to sum up the skills they developed at Radford University in a political science careers class, the Wicked Festival was cited again and again by students. One student explained this skill development in their reflection from the class:
With these [Wicked Festival] projects, you take a major problem in the world and attempt to solve it. However, the problem needs to be hard to solve, it has to have complexity, or maybe the solution is a completely new idea. An example of a wicked problem was when the coronavirus first arrived in 2019. Once you get your topic you work in a team to work through the issue, and then at the end of the semester, you share your research at an event. You create a large poster to present at the event which usually has around 500 students and staff. So, throughout the project, you learn how to think critically, how to evaluate solutions, how to work well with a team, and how to present your findings. At this event, you dress professionally, and you work on your public speaking skills by repeatedly having different groups of people view your project. The first one can be challenging and from personal experience, it was by far the most nerve-wracking. However, I have now done four of them and will be doing a fifth this semester. Every time you do it you build on the skills and knowledge of the previous one. So, by the time I graduate, I can feel confident in these skills.
The Festival’s impact has been noticed by our University’s President as well. Interviewed by a student team at the spring 2024 Wicked Festival on the festival’s benefits, Dr. Bret Danilowicz responded: “It was so easy to see for the students who have taken a couple of Wicked Festival classes now, the way they speak, the way they present, the professionalism, the way they describe and present their posters . . . I’m seeing all these skills around employability from written communication to verbal communication to interpersonal skills to logic . . . critical thinking . . . you could just see it. [The students are] taking what they are learning and applying it to life” (Danilowicz, 2024).
In addition to the Wicked Festival, we have built curricular pieces to the Wicked Initiative as well. There is the Wicked Problems class in the Department of Philosophy and Religion (mentioned above) that serves as an introductory course to the College Honors program. This course includes learning outcomes such as describing complex problems and possible approaches in the context of multiple social or ecological systems and working with a team effectively to posit and apply solutions to complex problems. Students in this often theme-based class (climate, inequality) work with campus and community partners to identify and research wicked problems and potential solutions. In their teams, they develop policy proposals and public presentations of their research, including at the Wicked Festival.
There is also a Wicked Problems minor combining courses in Philosophy, Religion, and Political Science. The minor combines six courses dealing with complex public problems, most participating in the Wicked Festival, with a view to creating students from a variety of campus disciplines who are adept and publicly engaged problem solvers.
One of the authors has created new student associations, the Wicked Society and Wicked Graduate Alliance, for undergraduate and graduate students to promote further discourse on wicked problems and their solutions on our campus. Wicked Society members conduct higher-level research on wicked problems and helped their faculty mentor demonstrate this pedagogy, along with Dr. Paul Hanstedt, author of Creating Wicked Students, at the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education Conference in Lisbon, Portugal in September 2023. Following their presentation, the Radford University student team was recognized by the conference organizers with “Outstanding Achievement” and “Meritorious Achievement” awards. Other accomplishments of the Society are creating the Wicked Problems Toolkit[2], a repository of open educational resources to facilitate teaching of and research on wicked problem solving, and a Wicked Problems Podcast[3].
The Wicked Initiative was seeded by one of the authors, our campus’ Executive Director of Faculty Development, choosing Hanstedt’s book for that faculty book group back in 2021. Creating Wicked Students inspired the faculty from the bottom up to develop the festival, the minor, and the student associations. We have watched our students thrive through the various facets of the Wicked Initiative. They are graduating more empowered and professionally ready. While some leaders were reluctant to embrace the term “wicked,” our students love it, and we know the world is full of wicked problems waiting for them to solve.
Endnotes
[1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/node/316767/policy-analysis-exercise
[2] https://f95203e3-bf39-423f-84b7-f106adb572e9.godaddysites.com/
[3] https://wickedsociety.godaddysites.com/podcast
References
Danilowicz, Bret. 2024. Interview by Melissa Cornils and John Russo. April 11. Radford University, Radford, Virginia. Videorecording.
Hanstedt, Paul. 2018. Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World. New York: Routledge.
Lake, Danielle, Phillip Motley, Megan Casner, and Kathleen Flannery. 2022. “Design Thinking Community Health & Well-being: Creating with and for Community Capacities.” In DRS2022: Bilbao, Spain. 25 June to 3 July 2022. eds. D. Lockton, S. Lenzi, P. Hekkert, A. Oak, J. Sadaba, and P. Lloyd. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.210.
Rittel, Horst W. J. and Melvin M. Webber. 1973. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4(2): 155-169.
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Dr. Paige Tan is Professor of Political Science, Coordinator of the Wicked Festival, and Director of the Wicked Problems Minor at Radford University.
Dr. Heather Keith is Executive Director of Faculty Development and Professor of Philosophy at Radford University.
Dr. Tay Keong Tan is Professor of Political Science, Faculty Director of the Virginia Governor’s School for the Visual & Performing Arts and Humanities at Radford University, and Faculty Advisor to the Wicked Society and Wicked Graduate Alliance.
Published since 2005, The Political Science Educator is the newsletter of the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association. All issues of The Political Science Educator can be viewed here.
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