Educating the Full Spectrum of Learners

Our national collaborative brings together leading dental schools, educators, humanities scholars, and bioethicists with a shared mission: to enrich dental education through the incorporation of health humanities and bioethics. By fostering a holistic understanding of patient care, ethics, and the human condition, we aim to support dental professionals and trainees who are not only clinically proficient but also empathetic, ethically grounded, and culturally competent. We are working to reach these pedagogical goals by providing a diverse set of internationally accessible online educational events.

The University of Colorado’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities (CBH) and School of Dental Medicine (SDM) worked together in 2023 to found the National Collaborative on Humanities and Ethics in Dentistry (NCHED) with the aim of creating unique and valuable opportunities for reflection, learning and teaching on ethical issues in dentistry and to stimulate progress nationwide in using arts and humanities to improve dental practice, research, policy and education.

The CBH is passionate about building communities to explore solutions to deep-seated quandaries related to humanities and ethics in dentistry, with a focus on the potential for dental faculty, practitioners, and students to drive positive change in the communities they serve. Meanwhile, the CU School of Dental Medicine is a leader in both dental ethics and dental humanities, with an active Student Professionalism & Ethics in Dentistry Association (SPEA) chapter, faculty ethicists, a strong international program, and intentional ethics and humanities curriculum opportunities.

The SDM and CBH faculty have previously collaborated to develop a course entitled theArt of Observation and Listening, recognizing that observation, active listening, accurate description and interpretation are essential skills in the clinical diagnosis and management of patients. Art, music and performing arts provide a creative, safe and culturally diverse environment for refining these abilities in learners, and exploration of these skillsets is enhanced through experiential and expert guided activities, self-reflection, and group discussions.

The goals are to increase compassion and empathy, encourage tolerance for ambiguity and diversity, recognize biases in interpretation and foster reflection and honest communication using the arts to gain these skillsets.

In 2015, the UTHealth School of Dentistry (with support from the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics) launched a dental humanities program, which is the first of its kind in any United States dental school. Since the first class was admitted, about 30 students have graduated from the program. It is a three-year program with learning opportunities that allow students to reflect, share, and work together to enhance their individual and collective capacities to care for patients in humanistic ways. 

The basic requirements of the program include:  

• Attendance at program meetings and at events related to humanities or ethics in the Houston community
• Completion of interprofessional elective courses on topics such art, ethics, literature, and history
• Reflective journaling
• Service learning
• Final project

Rochester, New York has a rich but complicated history of health education. The Department of Health Humanities & Bioethics and the Eastman Institute for Oral Health have joined together a group of dental professionals, health humanities scholars, and bioethicists to deliver continuing education for dental and medical trainees and professionals – working to lessen the historical divide between medical and dental education.

Founded as a Division of Health Humanities in 1984 and expanded in 2021, the Department of Health Humanities & Bioethics produces field-leading scholarship and provides well-rounded education for the University of Rochester’s medical students, furthering the practice of the biopsychosocial model of medicine that is a hallmark of the university. The Eastman Institute for Oral Health, founded as the Rochester Dental Dispensary, has been operating for over one hundred years to provide excellent oral care in Western New York. Funded initially by the Kodak entrepreneur George Eastman, the Institute for Oral Health is linked, through the Eastman International Alliance, to institutions in London, Rome, Brussels, Stockholm, and Paris.