Moving outside the comfort zone: teacher’s experiences of development in a police academy context

ABSTRACT

This paper examines police educators’ descriptions of development, building on an area of research investigating teachers’ perspectives of their practice. The aim of this study was to describe the variation in police educators’ teaching development experiences, with these results being used to inform development towards learner-centred practice. The research method of phenomenography informed the data collection and analysis process. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with police educators across five Australian police academies. Comparative analysis of the transcripts led to the construction of three qualitatively different categories representing variation from less to more complete experiences. The results demonstrated a teacher-centred experience focused on content knowledge, a transitional experience concerned with engaging students and a learner-centred experience with a strong focus on determining what works for students’ learning. When compared with a sample of development experiences from the broader educational field, the results contributed new insights into how teachers deal with comfort when becoming more learner-centred.

KEYWORDS:

• Police education
• teacher development
• problem-based learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The categories of experiences in this study are inclusive of research participants’ descriptions of both conceptions (what they think) and approaches (relevant actions) towards development.

2 In a phenomenographic study, a set of categories of description represents a series of increasingly complex and sophisticated subsets of which the quality can be weighed by the researcher (McKenzie 1997). The relationship between these categories is frequently hierarchical and inclusive, with the more complex or quality sets being preferred or desirable when describing how a professional experiences a phenomenon (Box 2013; Feixas 2000).

3 Highlights important or critical differences in learning or understanding between experiences represented in the categories.

4 These include: Australian Federal Police (AFP), New South Wales (NSW) Police, Victoria Police, Tasmania Police and Western Australia (WA) Police.