What will the future of dental education look like?
Dental education must evolve to ensure new generations of dentists are prepared to enter the field. The American Dental Education Association (ADEA) is dedicated to developing that future-ready workforce. Karen West, DMD, MPH, president and CEO of ADEA, spoke to Dental Bite about exciting opportunities in dental education and some of ADEA’s current initiatives.
—Interview by Carrie Pallardy, edited by Bianca Prieto
What do you think are the most exciting opportunities in dental education this year?
The most exciting thing for me is the fact that dental education is evolving very, very rapidly. We have to be proactive in thinking about where we're going to be in 10, 20, 30 years.
Who are our students of the future going to be? What are their characteristics? We in dental education have to prepare for that. We have to prepare our faculty to be able to teach new techniques, advanced techniques. The future is wide open, and we have to embrace it
Are there any ways you think dental education stakeholders need to evolve to keep up with how quickly the field is changing?
We have always been a proponent of lifelong learning. When people graduate from dental school, it doesn't stop there. We have to keep up with all the current literature, with best practices.
Students coming in right now are very different from what they were 10 years ago. We've got the millennials, we've got Gen Zers. It's important for us to be aware, as educators, of how these students will learn. What's the best way to help them become a good dentist, a competent dentist, and how can we teach better to allow them to succeed?
Are there any ADEA initiatives planned for this year that you’d like to highlight?
We have a task force that we put together a couple of years ago: the Task Force on Envisioning and Transforming the Future of Oral Health and Education. Right now, there are three subgroups that are looking at different areas in dental education. One is the future of oral health delivery systems. How are we going to be delivering oral health care? Then, there's the business model of future oral health systems. And there's the knowledge development, which is the curriculum.
Right now, we're beginning to move into the next phase, which is developing criteria for pilot projects that ADEA will help fund to test out some of these theories about what dental education will look like and how we can do it better.
We were able to go to Africa in July, and we were requested by the African dental education schools to help them start an African Dental Education Association. We were in Morocco and Casablanca for the establishment of the first African Dental Education Association. We're continuing to help them with bylaws and implementation.
We're also working on ethical protocols for decision-making in dental education. We're trying to move forward with developing guidelines and ethical principles for the use of AI in dental education.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Thanks for reading today's edition! You can reach the newsletter team at newsletter@dentalbite.co. We enjoy hearing from you.
Interested in advertising? Email us at newslettersales@mvfglobal.com
Dental Bite is curated and written by Carrie Pallardy and edited by Bianca Prieto
