There is a significant body of evidence indicating that accounting undergraduate students adopt an instrumentalist approach to learning. This paper describes an instructional project that develops an activity designed to encourage these skills on a final year management accounting course. The activity uses communicative learning pedagogies, adopting an explicit consideration of the role of hermeneutics in approaching case study materials in class. The outcomes of the activity are described, including impact on student engagement, class participation and subsequent student behavior. The paper concludes with a reflective discussion of the consequences of using the activity and its implications for addressing instrumentalist approaches to learning.