Poliser som utbildar poliser Reflexivitet, meningsskapande och professionell utveckling

Sammanfattning: This compilation thesis concerns how an educator task in Swedish police education context can be understood as individual and collective meaning making and professional development. The main actors in this thesis are police teachers, police supervisors and field training officers (FTOs), and have a mutual task in educating new police officers and hence preparing for a complex occupation. However, due to varied educating preparations these three groups of police educators seem to perform their task with different prerequisites in a constantly revised and developed Swedish police education. During the last twenty years research and literature regarding occupational and professional education concern, among other issues, professional development and professionalization, frequently from a learner orientated and lifelong learning perspective. Hence, as ideas of transferring occupational knowledge from person to person increasingly appears to be regarded as obsolete, internship education through supervising pedagogies seems to have evolved during the last decades. The rarely investigated intra-professional educators (e.g., police officers educating new police officers) have an important role in this kind of learning process, especially due to socialisation phenomena frequently described in worldwide research regarding the police occupation. The conceptions of Swedish intra-professional police educators are investigated through an exploratory and qualitative design using mainly focus-group interviews and with a reflexive approach and hermeneutic analyse models. Viewed through a theoretical framework based on meaning making, reflexivity and thought styles/thought collectives, the findings disclose that the Swedish police educators clearly share similar views on pedagogies although they have disparate preparations before the task. Their conceptions reveal how the police educating task works as an incentive for increased insights in the police task, as well as in the educating task. These findings are also conceptualized as a collective process in interacting with police students and police probationers, with reflexivity as a main tool for meaning making, especially in the educating task. In conclusion this thesis argues how the conceptions of the Swedish police educators can vitalize the discussion about how police educators better can be prepared, especially through courses with reflexive pedagogies. The conclusion also emphasizes on how the positive, reflexive and creative intentions within the intra-professional police educators can be used as a role model and as an incentive in developing the Swedish police force, and that these ideas can be applied on other occupations and professions.