Att omskapa sin professionella identitet : Från polis till polislärare via intersubjektiva möten

Sammanfattning: This licentiate thesis builds on the assumption that there is a shift in professional perspective when a police officer takes on the task of a police teacher in the Police Basic Education Training Programme. This shift of perspective is described as a professional process as well as a learning process, and the investigation focuses the reshaping of one’s professional identity.The investigation is based on focus group interviews with four different groups of police teachers in Växjö, Stockholm, and Umeå, where they were asked to talk about their task as police teachers. The analysis is built on theories from George Herbert Mead, Moira von Wright, and Ludwik Fleck about the importance of in-tersubjective interaction in the interpersonal or social perspective of construction knowledge about oneself as a subject and the surrounding world. Professional identity is defined as the way, consciously or unconsciously, an individual under-stands oneself as a professional; it is seen as an ongoing process shaped by con-tinuous intersubjective meetings with others in a changeable world. Professional, personal and possibly tacit knowledge is in that aspect developed and may be pos-sible to articulate in the right environment, for example within focus groups.The findings indicate that the change of professional task of the police teachers affects their understanding of themselves as professionals, i.e., their professional identity. The development of new professional and personal knowledge is due to the ability to reflect on the outcome of the intersubjective meetings with students and other teachers. This change of professional identity of the police teachers complicates their mission in two aspects. First, the denial of the relationship with the students as colleagues could be in conflict with the expectation from the stu-dent police officers. Secondly, the gap in knowledge about police work between the reflected personal knowledge of the police teachers and the student police offi-cers’ knowledge built on movies and books makes it difficult to meet the students at their level. This situation demands opportunities for police teachers to discuss their tasks with other teachers on campus, in the context of intersubjective meet-ings.