What can dental education gain by understanding student experience of the curriculum?

INTRODUCTION: Within higher education, there is increasing recognition that understanding the ways students experience the educational environment is critical to developing programmes that can educate our future professionals. There is a small body of literature about how students experience the dental educational environment; however, none that adopts a qualitative phenomenographic approach. This study aims to contribute to our understanding by asking what is the variation in the ways dental students experience their curriculum? METHODS: This study uses a phenomenographic methodology. Phenomenography investigates the variation in the way a group of people experience a situation, and how they ascribe meaning to it. Interviews were conducted with 14 senior dental students at the University of Sydney. Transcripts were analysed using a phenomenographic approach. RESULTS: Six increasingly sophisticated, qualitatively distinct categories of description were identified from the collective of transcripts: surviving the education system; following a guide or manual, learning how to treat teeth, learning how to meet patient treatment needs, learning how to relate with patients and understanding the complexities of dental practice. The outcome space consists of ways the categories of description are related; considering interactions with teachers, ways of coping with multiple opinions and integration of disciplinary learning. CONCLUSION: This study provides new insights into the multifaceted and relational ways that dental students experience their educational environment. It could point curriculum designers towards strategies that assist students develop sophisticated understandings about themselves as practitioners, patients and the complexities of dental practice. Suggestions about the practical implications of the findings of this research are given.

Are dental students ready for supercomplex dental practice?

Contemporary dental practice requires practitioners who are able to draw upon varying interconnected knowledge and skills, in order to make judgments and take action when faced with multiple, often contradictory, ways of interpreting a situation. However, the curricula that prepare students for dental practice are traditionally based on the theoretical knowledge and technical skills to be gained by students. This is despite evidence in the dental literature of a collective desire for graduates to have more range and depth in their repertoire. Examination of contemporary dental practice through the lens of supercomplexity (Higher Education, 40, 409 and 2000) provides contextual understanding and a platform to explore the types of learning and curriculum approaches that can best prepare students for professional practice. From the insights offered by examples from other professional fields, we, as dental educators, can begin to conceptualise learning dentistry as much more than competency frameworks or descriptions of what students need to know and be able to do. Rather, to equip graduates for contemporary dental practice, the dental curriculum needs to become a vehicle for students to develop personally and professionally as well as teaching the theoretical and technical aspects of dentistry.