Introduction

The first module I ever led was in the 2011/ 2012 academic year at a college that taught degrees awarded by a university that has since changed its name, as part of an honours degree in policing and community studies that no longer exists. ‘Community & Diversity’ was a final year module with two learning outcomes, concerning prejudice and cohesion. Being new to both the programme and module leadership, I followed my predecessor's scheme of learning, which organised the 30 weeks of teaching around eight topics: multi-agency policing, social identity, policing hard to reach groups, social exclusion, multiculturalism, equality of opportunity, the politics of policing, and the role of gender. As most of the 27 students in the class had enrolled on the programme with the intention of pursuing a career in the criminal justice system, I thought it was important to emphasise police practice and made extensive use of case studies and student debates, both enhanced by audio-visual means, mostly short clips from documentaries, television, or films. I was particularly keen to convey the difficulties of policing ‘hard to reach groups’, communities where relationships with the police are either strained or antagonistic. Having had some experience of this aspect of policing in my own career in law enforcement, the obvious choice was to introduce narratives of that experience into the relevant lectures, but I worried that these would be lost amidst the rest of the lecture and fail to communicate what it is like to police a community in which one is not welcome. Instead, I created five scenarios loosely based on my experiences, where I described a situation in detail and asked students to discuss: how they thought they would respond; how they thought police officers should respond; and how they thought the police officers had responded. Once the groups had presented their answers to the class, I described the actual response and turned the discussion to the reasons for the discrepancies between preferred and actual responses. Overall, I was happy with the lesson, but I felt that I could have conveyed the challenges of this aspect of policing in a more memorable manner and intended to revise the lesson plan the following year.