Abstract:

Within higher education, there’s a struggle to capture students’ interest and to increase the levels of concentration within the classroom. Therefore, student engagement is increasingly recognized as a cornerstone of effective learning and academic success. Particularly, programs that are designed for students to develop not only cognitive competencies but also personal, academic, and professional abilities, required by the 21st-century knowledge society we live in. Developing analytical reasoning, critical thinking, problem-solving, and competent communication is fundamental to involve students in their own learning process. Fostering engagement is essential to preparing students to become resilient and proactive professionals. However, despite its prominence in educational discourse, the concept of engagement remains undervalued. This paper examines how educators can promote student engagement to enhance teaching and learning in corporate communication education, adopting a reflexive and multidimensional framework, explores affective, social, behavioral, and cognitive engagement.

The paper seeks to broaden current understandings of engagement and identify practical strategies that educators can employ to strengthen students’ participation, motivation, and sense of belonging. We propose a teaching- learning methodology designed to foster students’ engagement. The methodology was developed over years of experiments and is based on four pillars:
(1) Learning by examples - demonstrations, videos, and analogies - case studies are presented to encourage reflection among students
(2) Flipped classroom - the content is made available in advance on the Moodle platform.
(3) Practical application of the content to a company, chosen by the students, organized in work groups, from a list of suggested companies. However, students are free to propose an alternative company to serve as a case study throughout the semester, thereby enhancing their engagement with a company of their choice.
(4) Peers learning at two levels: in the group and during the class, feedback from the peers and the teacher.

This is a reflexive work that aims to integrate different approaches and analytical as well as practical dimensions to develop a methodology that aims to achieve better levels of student engagement. The proposed method has been developed over the years and is transdisciplinary, as students use it, and the same case study, across at least 3 different curricular units, deepening their knowledge about the case study company, enhancing the collaborative work competencies, and fostering their understanding of the importance of feedback in the work context. Through students' feedback, consistently obtained over time, results demonstrate that students’ engagement levels are higher, as evidenced by the expressions – "we" or "our company" – used when referring to the case study companies. Furthermore, it shows that this methodology enhances their ability to apply concepts and models, otherwise addressed only theoretically, to a concrete organizational reality, which brings students closer to the real-life situations they will face in their future professional performance as communication advisors, directly contributing to the development of skills such as analytical reasoning, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
Ultimately, this work contributes to advancing more creative, inclusive, and student-centered approaches to learning, which are vital for the future.

Keywords:

Students' engagement; case study based methodology; skills development.