Knowledge Requirements in the Governing Documents of the Swedish Police Programme<subtitle>An Explorative Study of the Programme's First Semester</subtitle>

Abstract

Our study investigates how knowledge requirements are formulated in policy documents for a police education situated in an academic context. Through an explorative quantitative and qualitative content analysis, we seek to answer the following questions: What knowledge requirements are presented in course syllabi for the first semester of five different police programmes in Sweden? What similarities and differences are there? The result implies that a higher education policy frame dominates the design of curricula and program profiles. Lower-order cognitive skills are predominant in the knowledge requirements in the first semester of all police training programmes in Sweden, but with a balance of academic and professional practices, and of conceptual and contextual coherence in curricula. The universities differ mostly when it comes to knowledge requirements on a higher-order cognitive level, and here there is an imbalance in sequence and pace in curricula between different programmes. Both balance and variations are discussed with the aim of opening up for an innovative debate on knowledge requirements in police education.

Keywords

• Curricula
• knowledge requirements
• police education
• profession