‘Bedfordshire's first black male police officer: memoir and collaboration as education’

Abstract

This chapter offers a reflective account of a collaborative writing project, and it therefore has a rather different purchase on both education and the educator than the collection’s other pieces. The project is the memoir of Eric Edwin, Bedfordshire’s first Black male police officer, who, after more than thirty years with the force, was diagnosed in late 2016/early 2017 with multiple myeloma. The chapter deals first with the nuts-and-bolts business of writing the memoir - an education in itself, as the project as a whole and our individual roles in it were new to each of us. Second, the chapter addresses the project’s ethical implications. We reflect not only on the writing team in the role of educator, but on the project as an educational process in which the politics of race and racialized experience are interlaced.