I love working with ‘Proper’ students. ‘Actual’ students; ‘Real’ students… I don’t think it’s just me in my teacher educator/ academic developer role who says stuff like this. It’s one odd side of the way we refer to folk we work with because of the nature of our work. The large part of what many of us do: lecturer/ teacher development/ training, CPD and so on also often puts me in a linguistic pickle. Obviously these colleagues are not “students” in the traditional sense, but they’re also more than just “colleagues” in that context. They occupy a unique space in those moment at least: learners, collaborators, peers… and when I want to write about or talk about that I find myself saying awkward things like ‘my students who are of course my colleagues’

Do we need to neologise? Or has this been sorted but I just haven’t heard that all the cool academic developers use the term ‘Learn-o-nauts’ or something.

I tried to think of somehting but I am up early on the weekend and no-one is about so I sought some AI assistance. A couple are actually mine but I am too embarrrassed to say which.

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