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