Curriculum and School Practices in Dentistry

Starting from an innovative dialogue with the field of Education, the author sought in this work to consolidate a proposal for a sociocultural analysis of dental training processes, which has, among its presuppositions, the conception of curriculum as an expression of present and past symbolic struggles that define the cultural capital to be incorporated by each agent according to the position they occupy in the social space. Through careful ethnographic research, the political-administrative structure of a case school was described, as well as the agents who make up its social space, its physical structure, the uses of school time, the curriculum model and the criteria that guide the selection and organisation of knowledge, as well as the routines in which the current modes of transmitting professional culture content are encapsulated. This dense description allowed us to interpret the elements of the school's culture that influence its curriculum and the school practices in force there, highlighting the social bases that define them and also the mechanisms of cultural conservation that work to preserve a certain habitus in the new generations of dental surgeons.