Teaching-service-community integration in Dentistry: a cultural study^*

Abstracts

The aim of this study was to analyze teaching-service-community integration in a Dentistry course, based on curricular internships seen in the perspective of health workers, students, users, managers and teachers. Twenty-seven semi-structured interviews were conducted, transcribed and thematically analyzed. The cultural representations about the studied integration are procedurally re-signified from the interactions and clashes between their different agents, enabling the sliding of expressed and shared meanings. The representations also operate in a contingent way, sometimes facilitating, sometimes hindering an effectively dialogic dentistry education process. Teaching-service-community integration, studied from one of its devices, supervised internships, is a place to get out of the self to experience theory-in-practice and practice-in-theory, with social and pedagogical actions that produce modernizations, co-accountability and knowledge oriented collectively and intentionally to the Brazilian National Health System.

Cultural studies; Dentistry; Public Health; Teaching