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Dental school curricula increasingly emphasize training in leadership, public health, community engagement and collaboration. Leadership may be defined as a relational process for inspiring and influencing positive change. Leadership training focused on effectively building relationships and partnerships to improve community health is particularly important with the increased emphasis on dental primary care, holistic care, rural care and health disparities. Dentists and other health care providers are encouraged to engage with communities and community partners and organizations to improve healthcare and overall health. To better educate and train dental students to meet these challenges, new and innovative methods of didactic and experiential coursework are needed. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The current study describes the development, delivery and preliminary evaluation of a community-engaged leadership training program for dental students. The program incorporated student-developed public health project proposals and sessions with simulated community partners based on a simulated rural community with specific oral and general health needs.

Overall, students felt the training was realistic and valuable for developing leadership skills and preparing them for challenges that could not have been learned through didactic instruction alone. Students gained a better understanding of their own leadership styles, their strengths and weaknesses and their level of developed leadership competencies.

This program is an innovative way to develop leadership applied to public health and community needs and should have implications for ways of teaching leadership to improve oral health outcomes.

This chapter describes the ways in which tasks structure group discussion and performance in organizational settings. Work teams are defined as three or more members of the same organization who work interdependently toward a shared task or goal while supporting that organization's mission. Action teams are a specific type of work group. They are characterized by tactical tasks that require newly formed teams to perform in high-stakes situations. This chapter starts by covering historical trends in organizational culture and climate and team training. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the interrelationships among tasks, communication, and performance. Several tips for managing effective work teams, such as staying on task during meetings and responding to changing team membership, are discussed. This chapter closes by making recommendations for future research.

This paper explores masculinity ideologies which influence family perspectives, and therefore, instigate mental distress among Black and White men between the ages of 18–30.

Using a grounded theory approach, 30 in-depth interviews were conducted to explore the social construction of masculinity and investigate the ways in which gender ideologies influence family gender roles.

Black men’s gender ideology was influenced by racial identity and stressed a communal and collaborative identity which can be seen by the reliance on religion and maintaining family financial stability. White employed a pragmatic, individual perspective that emphasized individual behavior in a changing society. They embraced evolving discourses necessary to cope with changing family structure and refocused attention from family of origin conflict.

Though this is a qualitative study, it does provide a starting point for further research on how the family roles of Black and White men affect their mental health.

Few studies have employed a racial comparison research design to investigate mental distress associated with gender ideologies. The paper suggests that moving forward will require, as Black men suggested, adopting a critical racial sociology of gender that emphasizes processes and social structure. Analyzing manhood acts through the lens of social marginality, identity work to claim membership in the male group, and the identification of characteristics to maintain male privileges vis-à-vis women may prove to be useful. Focusing on process allows an exploration of social forces that influence masculinity, gendered household ideologies, and mental health.

This chapter will examine ideological debates currently taking place in academics. Anthropologists – and all academic workers – are at a crossroads. They must determine what it means to “green the academy” in an era of permanent war, “green capitalism,” and the neoliberal university (Sullivan, 2010). As Victor Wallis makes clear, “no serious observer now denies the severity of the environmental crisis, but it is still not widely recognized as a capitalist crisis, that is, as a crisis arising from and perpetuated by the rule of capital, and hence incapable of resolution within the capitalist framework.”