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

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.