Learning styles
The traditional teaching styles are advancing, and teachers are currently adjusting their teaching methods based on the student’s learning needs (Davis, 2009). Learning styles include authoritative, coach, or demonstrative learning, the facilitator, also known as activity learning, group learning, and hybrid or blended styles. Unlike before, presently, students must be familiar with more than the traditional subject area. They need to think critically, collaborate effectively with others, fit and understand the highly diverse community as well as transit smoothly from school work to practical work. As the content of learning is changing, the methodologies of teaching must change to be considered relevant.
Service-learning is one methodology of teaching and learning that provides an excellent platform for building students’ academics and their work-readiness skills and knowledge (Puri, Kaddoura & Dominick, 2013). It effectively combines the instructions of the teaching with relevant community service experiences while still meeting the goals of the given curriculum. Dental hygiene students, for instance, are potential community-oriented professionals who require not only the knowledge but also interactive, problem-solving, and decision-making skills to impact their patients effectively. These mandates that these students be prepared to directly apply their theoretical models in their fields using appropriate interpersonal skills which necessitating pairing of community-based service activities with structure preparation and students reflections (Puri, Kaddoura & Dominick, 2013).
The students will be part of the community-based dental cleaning program in one of the marginalized community identified by a community partner agency as a way of incorporating service-learning into the dental hygiene curriculum and part of their multicultural course. The dental hygiene students during the execution of the program activities will have mentors from university and the community partner agency, interpreters, and community partner agencies, as well as a dental hygiene instructor, to facilitate students’ interaction with the population and to practice accordingly.
The community partner agency wants these older people to recognize and understand the social context that exists of the smell of breath and how it relates to oral hygiene behavior (Ren et al., 2016). The community organization has divided the community into ten groups because of its bigger number of residents to make it easily manageable meaning that a group of ten dental hygiene students will be distributed across each of the ten groups in the community assisted with identified mentors, two translators, one university dental hygiene instructor, and possibly a clinical dentist per group. While in the community, dental hygiene students will aim to achieve the service objective, which is to teach older people how and why they need to ensure a clean mouth.
On the other hand, their learning objective will be discussing current literature on oral microbial flora and how they relate to halitosis and also to deliver their educational content in the most appropriate way to achieve a positive impact in the targeted population. The service-learning purpose will be to allow dental hygiene student exploit the imagery of pollution overcast attributed to many automotive fumes as a resemblance to link halitosis as the outcome of a packed collection of bacteria in the older peoples’ tongue (Ren et al., 2016). The dental hygiene students will then write some reflective essay describing their experiences.