Chapter Seven: Bedfordshire’s First Black Male Police Officer: Memoir and Collaboration as Education Available to Purchase

What follows is a reflective account of a collaborative writing project, which, at the time of writing (November 2024 through January 2025), has yet to be completed. This chapter, therefore, has a rather different purchase on both education and the educator than the other pieces in this collection. The project is the memoir of Eric Edwin, Bedfordshire’s first Black male police officer, who, after 30-plus years with the force, was diagnosed in late 2016 with multiple myeloma. The chapter is divided into two main sections, which deal 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 – and second with the project’s ethical implications. In what follows, 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.