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Global Citizenship Education in Dentistry?

 

Prof. Dr. Chun-Hung Chu (HKU) presenting his keynote lecture “Global Citizenship in Dentistry” at Mi-DENT 2022.

In-line with the Education 2030 Agenda and Framework for Action: Target 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 4 on Education), UNESCO advocates Global Citizenship Education (GCED) to “ensure that all learners are provided with the knowledge and skills to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development”. GCED is aimed to empower learners of all ages to assume active roles, both locally and globally, in building more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive and secure societies based on the three domains of learning – cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral.

In a recent invited key lecture in Mi-DENT 2022 by Prof. Dr. Chun-Hung Chu from the University of Hong Kong, he highlighted the possibility of adopting GCED into Dentistry; termed Global Citizenship in Dentistry (GCD). GCD is an approach with interlinked learning outcomes, learner attributes, topics, and learning objectives that integrates the three GCED’s domains (cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral). Using online platforms, students will be able to interact globally and learned about the dental practices across countries through meaningfully designed tasks. The exposure to a variety of rationale-based approaches to the same clinical problem further promotes students’ awareness, competencies, and confidence. They are more adept in reflecting on their own operative work and perform better in applying evidence-based dentistry. Follow Prof. Chu’s work at https://www.researchgate.net/lab/Chun-Hung-Chu-Lab.

At MAHSA, we anticipate initiating GCD for the greater value of our dental programmes and to kick-start the path to internationalisation and global interdisciplinary studies.

Reference:

UNESCO (2021), Global citizenship education. https://en.unesco.org/themes/gced