As University-based teacher educators, we are interested in the growing importance of the interface between the professional practices of HE (Higher Education) and non-HE partners in the wider Lifelong Learning sector. While welcoming the opportunity for collaboration, we are critical of many of the assumptions and practices which it risks perpetuating, in particular the focus on standardization and its negative impact on professional practice. Our empirical work with Police Firearms trainers is used to shed a critical light on practices at this interface and to undertake a critical analysis of trends in current discourses of professionalism in this context. Initially, we problematize views of professionalism by suggesting that a “hidden binary” exists in some professional contexts. This binary, we suggest, reinforces an “inside/outside” logic which contributes to a lack of effectiveness in some collaborative contexts. We draw our assertions from our empirical findings and then develop a theoretical analysis of our own attempts to contribute to effective professional practice in this context. Briefly put, our position is that: 1. Professional practice is currently over-regulated in a double sense: it is excessively codified from above and outside by a hierarchy of organizations, and this hierarchy also ensures insufficient contact with the professional practices it claims to regulate. 2. One reason for this is the mechanics of a three-tier implementation scheme: on top, high level policy attempts to instrumentalize professionalism for political gain: at the bottom, low level practices struggle to develop coherence; in between, a “buffer zone” consists of intermediaries which form a necessary but sometimes opaque contact zone between the two. 3. Although necessarily compliant with their image in policy circles, bottom-up practices do not correspond to it, providing examples of expansive learning
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