Empowering Diversity Competence: Student participation Initiatives Transform Teacher Education at OsloMet
The leadership and the student council at the Department of Art, Design and Drama at OsloMet recognized in 2020 that we needed a stronger focus on diversity competence in our teacher‑education programmes. The goal was both to increase subject‑matter competence among students and staff in diversity perspectives, and to enhance students’ sense of belonging, participation, and representation within their own study programmes.
A selected group of staff members and students was tasked with defining and creating teaching series on four different diversity perspectives. The focus was placed on perspectives that students could identify with and that could advantageously be strengthened in our programmes:
– mental health
– multicultural background (including an Indigenous perspective)
– universal design
– gender & sexuality
After that, we launched joint teaching series across all study programmes, based on the four perspectives. The students had primary responsibility for adapting the content to their group and community, and they ran the sessions each Wednesday—four times per semester. The sessions mixed lectures, discussions, workshops, and open conversations, and to ensure full attendance we locked the institute’s timetable for all full‑time students. We also invited external experts, which led to participation from many staff members and prompted reflection on their own scholarly “blind spots”. After three semesters, these teaching series have become a permanent part of courses that naturally fit, with a continuously high use of student assistants as an important resource in the development work.
While the teaching series were ongoing, the management began discussions on how learning‑outcome descriptions and course literature could better incorporate the selected diversity perspectives. In recent years this has produced visible changes in many reading lists and sharpened the curriculum—often beyond the minimum requirements in the national framework plan for teacher education. The work is still ongoing, both at OsloMet and at the institute level, and will probably never be completely “finished”.
Victoria Skogsletten Dalen, one of the first students to work on this project, who is now a fully qualified teacher with a master’s degree and (in 2026) the leader of the Student Parliament, answers a few questions based on her experience:
What was it about the project that made student involvement essential?
“The students bring experiences and perspectives on diversity that staff do not necessarily have access to. That is exactly why student voices are crucial for broadening understanding, asking new questions, and challenging established assumptions. Students know other students best and know how to reach their peers.”
What impact do you think it has when students take ownership of diversity perspectives in our education programmes?
“When students have genuine ownership of diversity work, both the relevance and the quality of the education increase. Collaboration between students and staff creates a more dynamic and credible diversity effort, and opens up conversations and reflections that would otherwise not arise.”
Because the leadership (at all levels) has raised this issue as important, we have been able to make larger changes—such as locking the timetable for participation, bringing in new expertise, and devoting more staff meetings to diversity topics. This has affected both courses and staff awareness. Recruitment processes now require knowledge of diversity, and students have been actively involved in those processes to stay closer to student needs in the programmes. Representation and broader student recruitment remain challenging, and this will be a focus area for the future.
By Petter William Hansen, study leader at the Department of Art, Design and Drama, Oslo Metropolitan University. And in dialog with Victoria Skogsletten Dalen
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22977833
Other relevant sources:
https://uni.oslomet.no/dengodestudentopplevelsen/sluttrapport/