Connecticut College AI and the Liberal Arts Symposium

In AI-rich classrooms, answers often arrive before questions. This creates a central paradox for liberal arts education: tools that promise intellectual support can also short-circuit the uncertainty and iteration through which thinking develops. This session reframes AI literacy as the ability to structure and sustain inquiry when answers are instantly available. Participants will examine how common assignment designs invite premature closure and will practice redesigning them using three strategies: staging tasks to delay answer-generation, requiring student reasoning before feedback, and separating composing from evaluation. Attendees will leave with adaptable frameworks for designing assignments that preserve critical thinking across disciplines, even when AI systems can generate polished responses on demand.