Summer 2008 | Web Exclusive
Career  | Higher Education

The love of learning

It’s not about grades—it’s about transformation.

by Kirsten Jarvi, RDH, BS

We are lucky to be dental hygienists. There are so many opportunities now, where we can take courses online and in the classroom to pursue a bachelor’s or master’s or complete a degree. Beyond making us better dental hygienists, the wonderful thing about these options is that we can use them to engage in interests outside of dental hygiene, including business, education, integrative health, social sciences, biological sciences, marketing, and the list goes on and on. This is an exciting time to be alive. Learning has never been more available, and as we strive to learn more, our values continue to evolve and expand.

One enduring precept of education is that we learn in order to serve. We learn in order to strengthen moral order and to accept our obligations to society. We learn in order to become more creative and inventive in finding solutions to complex social problems, and we understand that addressing those problems is part of the repayment for the inestimable gift of education. We learn in order to live out our ethics and to instill more mindfulness and humanity in our institutions or corporations. We learn in order to draw forth the spirit in our organizations, and then serve the greater good.

For all these reasons and more, higher education on an individual level can then be looked at as a step toward enhancing our communities.

GIVING BACK

Every day—whether we are in clinical practice, education, local components, or a listserv—we are in a community. Education places us in a learning community and from that center, the things we learn extend to our family, our place of business, our friends and all the other circles we inhabit. In recognition of the interconnectedness of what is taught in the classroom with what is lived in world, community project-based learning is being applied in schools across the country. This educational approach organizes curriculum, instruction and assessment around problems facing our community—say, access to healthcare—in a model that encourages students to gather and apply knowledge from multiple disciplines in a quest for solving the access problem in the community. The process is then guided by teachers who act as cognitive coaches, teaching the students critical thinking, problem solving and collaborative skills as they identify problems, formulate hypotheses, and ask significant societal questions, all while providing healthcare in the community itself.

Higher education will continue to evolve, change, adapt, and embody many purposes in this century. But moving and interlacing the values of service, community, stewardship, and the spirit of learning will create the wisest and most dramatic transformation.