Enhancing the hospitality student learning experience through student engagement: an analysis.

Abstract

Student engagement is fast becoming an important framework with which to understand educational issues and concerns such as academic performance or lack of it, absenteeism, dropout, poor class attendance and lack of participation. Without meaningful student engagement, effective learning and student success can hardly be possible. Consequently, academics and researchers in higher education institutions need to gain more understanding into the mechanisms of engaging hospitality students and the theories that underpin these mechanisms. This calls for sound research and practice driven initiatives that are meant to refresh and enhance existing hospitality student engagement-practices in higher education. This concept paper explores the essence of engagement with particular emphasis on hospitality students in universities. It seeks to stimulate an academic conversation around the concept of hospitality student engagement, its key dimensions, its rationale as well as possible strategies of engaging students. In doing this, the paper will not attempt to be prescriptive but will seek to provoke new insights and perspectives that help broaden understanding of the concept. The paper is derived from the author’s more than two decades-long experience of teaching in higher education as well as current and past local and international literature and journal articles on student engagement in higher education. The study’s findings established that student engagement is a pre-requisite for student success. The need to develop academics’ capacity in planning and designing engaging learning environments that stimulate students’ learning interest thus came to the fore.