| Summary: | This narrative inquiry concerns a small group of male and female former police officers, their lengthy experiences of being adult education students and their transition from policing into civilian life. It is an inquiry involving myself as a researcher separately and three men and one woman and it explores elements of personal and professional stories and individual routes into extended experiences of Higher Education. Anchored in a particular historical period in Northern Ireland recent past, characterised by declining paramilitary violence, a transforming political landscape and unprecedented police reform, the inquiry provides a narrative interpretation of educational experiences that developed in a changing personal, political, societal and professional context and seeks to expand the existing body of knowledge on police and educational scholarship. Influenced by a social constructivist perspective of identity, which embraces the notion that there are different methods available to the individual for the construction and reconstruction of the self during a life, the inquiry explores how leaving a unique occupational context, transited five individuals from one state of existence, policing, which had sustained them for many years, to another, civilian life, opening up a liminal space between two identities. In considering how these former police officers continue to negotiate that space, the inquiry concludes that academic development is continuing to play a valuable role in supporting their efforts to construct transitional identities following their move from their distinct identity as public servants to that of being private individuals detached from a unique policing experience.
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