Marketing topics through academic posters: An avenue to student autonomy and active citizenship

Since social and environmental challenges posed by the highly volatile, uncertain and complex world will mainly impact upon the young, schools need to instill in their graduates a set of critical-thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, strategy-building, and communication skills in order for students to be informed and engaged citizens. This paper postulates that in higher education institutions (HEIs), this can be achieved through fostering motivation and student autonomy. Academic posters are proposed as one of the relevant tools allowing educators to adopt an autonomy-supportive style of teaching that leads to enhanced independence, interest, and responsibility for social affairs. At their core, academic poster projects facilitate academic skills, including information processing, reading, writing, presenting, and defending ideas. Embracing in-depth research and enhanced social dialogue in lessons, they pinpoint leading ideas of the current young generation and as such can predict the topics of the future. Academic poster projects can be adopted in general subjects, as well as in language teaching, thus providing educators with a potent tool to achieve broad educational goals.