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Friday, October 16
 

1:00pm EDT

The Design Problem of AI Literacy: Teaching Thinking When Answers Are Instant
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Blaustein 210
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.
Speakers
BB

Benjamin Breyer

Senior Lecturer, Barnard College
Benjamin Breyer is Senior Lecturer in English at Barnard College, where he teaches First-Year Writing and directs research on AI-mediated learning and rhetorical scaffolds in the liberal arts. His work focuses on designing writing instruction that reinforces critical reading, interpretive... Read More →
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Blaustein 210
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

1:00pm EDT

The Great AIqualizer: How Small Liberal Arts Colleges Can Use AI to Rethink Administrative Work, Faculty Support, and Student Success
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
The conversation about AI in higher education is loud, anxious, and often dominated by the largest institutions with the most resources to navigate it. Small liberal arts colleges are watching from a complicated position: wary of the hype (if not downright resistant), uncertain about the risks, and not entirely sure the opportunity being described is one that was designed with them in mind. This presentation will argue that, for small colleges with distinctive curricula, signature programs, and their own institutional culture, AI can offers something more interesting than automation or efficiency gains. It offers, for the first time, the ability to build infrastructure that actually reflects what makes them distinctive. Tools that understand your academic model. Dashboards that speak your institutional language. Systems that serve your students, and not a generalized approximation of them.New College of Florida decided to rethink our approach to software built for someone else and start building tools that are genuinely, specifically ours. In a single academic year, a small cross-functional team (IT, Institutional Research, Registrar, Provost's Office, and students) built working dashboards for advising, athlete eligibility, thesis progress, early alert and retention, and faculty workloads, at a fraction of commercial licensing costs.This session is a practitioner's honest account of how we did it, and why the real payoff isn't efficiency. It's institutional identity.
Speakers
ML

Manuel Lopez

Associate Provost, New College of Florida
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

1:30pm EDT

Building the AI Ready Campus
Friday October 16, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
Higher education is entering a new era where AI is reshaping how institutions engage students, support staff, and operate at scale. Yet many campuses are still struggling to determine what true AI readiness actually looks like.This session explores how institutions can move beyond experimentation to build an AI-ready campus grounded in strategy, governance, and practical implementation. Attendees will learn how colleges are using AI to improve student engagement, streamline operations, and expand institutional capacity while maintaining a human-centered student experience.Through real examples and an interactive readiness framework, participants will examine common barriers to adoption, assess their institution’s current level of AI readiness, and identify practical next steps for moving forward. The session will also explore how AI agents and AI-supported workflows are changing expectations around responsiveness, personalization, and operational scalability across higher education.
Speakers
JB
Friday October 16, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

1:30pm EDT

Is this AI?: Fostering Critical AI Media Literacy
Friday October 16, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein 210
"Is this AI?" is a question vexing even the most media-savvy users today, as synthetic images and videos grow exponentially more convincing, with widespread circulation. But are there reliable "tells" and transferable frameworks for critical AI media literacy, even in this rapidly shifting landscape?  This interactive presentation invites participants to examine a curated selection of images and videos and discuss: Is this AI? How do you know? Rather than offering easy answers, this session will use guided exercises and discussion to consider critical media AI literacy, inviting participants to think about visual artifacts & physics (is the hair texture right?); anatomy & proportions (are the joints strangely elongated?); and context & coherence (what is the file provenance or source?).  Along the way, participants will consider deeper questions of authenticity, consent, and responsibility in an era of increasingly convincing synthetic media, and how critical AI media literacy has relevance in a liberal arts curriculum.
Speakers
MH
Friday October 16, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein 210
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

2:15pm EDT

AI and Ethics: Two Ideas, One Course
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
What can AI do, and what should it do? My approach to AI and Ethics builds a single inquiry from two disciplines that rarely share a room: computer science, where students implement a neural network from first principles without libraries, and serious philosophy, where they reason about how one ought to act. The pairing exposes a tension at the heart of the liberal arts in the age of AI. If a machine ties your shoes, do you ever learn to tie them yourself—or to do your arithmetic, your writing, your deciding? The liberal arts exist to cultivate precisely the capacities AI now offers to outsource: judgment, reflection, moral agency, the power to be more than a child of one’s time. This talk asks whether teaching AI must mean defending those capacities, and how one course might do both at once.
Speakers
DO
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

2:15pm EDT

Say “Yes” to the Mess: Critical Writing Process Reflection in the Age of GenAI
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
A common solution for wide-spread genAI use in writing courses is to incorporate tools like track changes and version histories. Ideally, these tools help students chart their writing process while working on an assignment. In practice, these tools can reinforce ideas of writing as complete and “perfectable” products with tracking changes acting as “proof” that students’ writing is their own. In this presentation, the speaker will share his development of an assignment sequence that encourages students to embrace the mess of the writing process. In this sequence, students color-code and annotate a “Writer’s Version” of their drafts as they iterate and tinker with their compositions. Students are not assessed on their final products but rather the critical reflections they perform with the assistance of these “messy drafts” that make explicit the writing process behind their projects.
Speakers
NW
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

2:45pm EDT

Reducing LLM Drift Using Explicit Ethical and Policy-Based Principles
Friday October 16, 2026 2:45pm - 3:15pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
Large language models (LLM) are being used in educational settings to provide guidance, feedback, and policy-related judgments. However, these systems produce inconsistent responses to similar cases, raising concerns about fairness, transparency, and trust. Rather than relying on probabilistic model output, our approach represents cases in terms of salient features and applies principles derived from institutional academic policies to guide decisions. The LLM remains responsible for interpreting cases, while a separate layer using principles ensures similar cases are treated consistently. This approach offers a middle ground between unrestricted generative AI and rule-based systems.  By making the basis for decisions explicit and inspectable, it provides greater transparency, supports accountability,and allows policies to be operationalized in a consistent form.  We illustrate the approach using examples drawn from our college policies concerning student use of AI and discuss the implications for responsible deployment within the liberal arts.
Speakers
TJ
MC
Friday October 16, 2026 2:45pm - 3:15pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Ethics, Equity, and Environmental Impact

2:45pm EDT

The Imagined Author in the Age of AI
Friday October 16, 2026 2:45pm - 3:15pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
This presentation examines how generative and agentic AI systems reshape traditional understandings of authorship, rhetorical agency, and literacy within contemporary writing practices. Drawing on Walter Ong’s fictionalized audience, Wayne Booth’s implied author, Michel Foucault’s author-function, Roland Barthes’ “death of the author,” and Eefje Claassen’s work on author representation, the session argues that AI-mediated writing produces an “imagined author” distributed across human writers, machine systems, institutions, and algorithmic discourse. The presentation explores how students increasingly write with, for, and against AI systems while negotiating questions of authenticity, authority, labor, and technological literacy. Situating AI writing within broader rhetorical and digital literacy ecologies, the session challenges crisis-based narratives surrounding AI and composition. Participants will leave with a theoretical framework for understanding AI-mediated authorship and practical approaches for teaching rhetorical awareness, ethical AI engagement, and critical AI literacy within liberal arts education.
Speakers
BH

Brenda Hardin Abbott

Associate Professor of English, Bay Path University
Friday October 16, 2026 2:45pm - 3:15pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

3:25pm EDT

From Shortcut to Thought Partner: Training Liberal Arts Students to Collaborate With AI
Friday October 16, 2026 3:25pm - 3:55pm EDT
Blaustein 210
This session introduces Colgate University’s Innovation Fellows and their use of AI, and its evolution into a new undergraduate consulting program that pairs human-centered design (Design Thinking) with intentional, responsible AI use to solve real campus problems. Rather than viewing AI as a shortcut, this program trains liberal arts students to leverage it as an active collaborative thought partner for synthesizing research, stress-testing prototypes, and generating ideas.The session highlights their inaugural pilot success: a partnership with Colgate’s ITS Service Desk to rethink and revise intern training. Using empathy-gathering interviews, observations, and surveys, as well as a design sprint, the student team produced a training program that includes AI-generated instructional content, a role-playing simulation game, and a skills progression rubric. The proposal was accepted by ITS for implementation beginning summer 2026. Presenters will detail the program's design, AI learning outcomes, and pilot results, while examining why liberal arts institutions are uniquely positioned to model this work.
Speakers
KH

Karen Harpp

Professor, Colgate University

avatar for Ahmad Khazaee

Ahmad Khazaee

Director of creative technologies, engagement and support, Colgate University
Ahmad is currently the director of creative Technologies, Engagement and Support. With previous roles in student support, instructional support, and desktop administration he is able to leverage a variety of perspectives when approaching new problems.
Friday October 16, 2026 3:25pm - 3:55pm EDT
Blaustein 210
  Teach the Room, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

3:55pm EDT

Cultivating Judgment Through Guided Experience: A Human-Centered Approach to AI Literacy
Friday October 16, 2026 3:55pm - 4:25pm EDT
Blaustein 210
This session proposes how to define and teach “AI literacy” in liberal arts classrooms for the increasingly AI-integrated world. Unguided AI use does not automatically produce literacy; instructions focused solely on a technical capacity will become outdated at every major model change. Instead, AI literacy must be captured as a disposition, or a durable habit of the mind, that emphasizes the value of human judgment in ever-changing technological landscape. The pedagogical task is to cultivate this disposition through intentional hands-on engagement that turns AI use into an object of guided critical inquiry: observing, iterating, and evaluating human-AI interaction and developing sound judgment for responsible human-AI collaboration. Participants will experience a short AI literacy activity that reveals a commonly held misconception about AI and debrief how guided encounters can help students examine AI behavior, their own assumptions, and the ethical choices involved in learning with AI.
Speakers
SK

Sawa Kurotani

Professor, University of Redlands
Friday October 16, 2026 3:55pm - 4:25pm EDT
Blaustein 210
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

4:40pm EDT

Student Experiences: DavisAI Summer Research
Friday October 16, 2026 4:40pm - 5:10pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
Teach the Room session featuring student experiences from DavisAI Summer Research. Presenters: Connecticut College students.
Friday October 16, 2026 4:40pm - 5:10pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element
 
Saturday, October 17
 

10:20am EDT

Beyond Summaries: Reclaiming Reading in an AI-mediated world
Saturday October 17, 2026 10:20am - 10:50am EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
Global decline in  reading motivation has coincided with educators assigning fewer whole books. Moreover, teaching reading has become challenging as AI offers automated-summaries, allowing students to skip deep reading. Drawing on research from the neuroscience of reading, this interactive session will address questions from both the instructors’ and students’ perspectives:What is the purpose of reading? If AI can summarize a text, what are the pedagogical implications for reading instruction?How is reading interconnected with writing and other multimodal ways of learning? What cognitive capacities are lost when reading becomes optional?What teaching practices in Liberal Arts colleges can be advantageous to make reading meaningful? Using concrete pedagogical approaches from Amherst, we will investigate how AI is reshaping students’ relationship with reading. These examples will help us together probe the ways that reading functions not an isolated skill but rather as a multimodal, social, and intellectually resilient experience.
Speakers
avatar for Jaya Kannan

Jaya Kannan

Director of Technology for Curriculum and Research, Amherst College
Jaya Kannan is Director of Technology for Curriculum and Research at Amherst College, where she leads the Academic Technology Services unit. She holds a PhD in Computer Assisted Language Learning and her higher education background spans international teaching, faculty development... Read More →
KR

Kristina Reardon

Amherst College
Saturday October 17, 2026 10:20am - 10:50am EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

10:50am EDT

Literature as Information Control: How Understanding Narrative Increases AI Literacy
Saturday October 17, 2026 10:50am - 11:20am EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
Narrative is deeply embedded in everything from our personal habits to socioeconomic guidelines and the operation of digital systems. This presentation introduces how—by connecting the study of literature to daily interactions with these systems—we can increase the value students discover in their literature courses, and better communicate how they apply that value to their personal and professional goals. Through this process, systems like social media, algorithms, and AI become organic topics of discussion in context of story structure and narrative form. By articulating how the study of narrative unlocks the tools and techniques of systems designed to gain our attention and stir emotion, students learn to use those same tools and techniques to take greater agency in the control of information and their own meaning-making. Practical uses of AI will be explored that supplement and augment this process, without diminishing practice of critical skills.
Speakers
avatar for Ryan Crawford

Ryan Crawford

Director of First Year Writing/Assistant Professor of Practice, University of New Haven
Ryan Crawford is Assistant Professor of Practice and Director of First-Year Writing in the Department of English at University of New Haven. His research, including the book Emotional Value in the Composition Classroom: Self, Agency, and Neuroplasticity, combines neuroscience, composition... Read More →
Saturday October 17, 2026 10:50am - 11:20am EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

11:30am EDT

Publishing at the Speed of AI
Saturday October 17, 2026 11:30am - 12:00pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
AI is compressing the timeline from idea to publication—but faster doesn't have to mean sloppier. In this 30-minute session, Second Draft Labs, a new publishing company, walks through their publishing process, showing how AI tools can accelerate drafting, editing, and production without sacrificing the judgment and craft that good publishing depends on. Attendees will leave with a clear picture of what a modern, AI-assisted publishing workflow actually looks like in practice, where human editorial decisions still matter most, and a roadmap for getting published.
Speakers
PD
AP
Saturday October 17, 2026 11:30am - 12:00pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Innovations

1:00pm EDT

A Practical Framework for Assessing AI Risk and Readiness in Divisions, Centers, Programs, and Departments
Saturday October 17, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
Colleges and universities have barely begun to evaluate the risks and rewards of ubiquitous AI use on their campuses. This session introduces a framework for assessing AI readiness and risk in divisions, departments, centers, and programs. This presentation will highlight key research, legal precedents, and strategies for identifying gaps between policy and pedagogy. Using an experiential approach, attendees will have space to reflect on the profound AI-related changes taking place and consider which roles or areas are most exposed to AI-driven change. Organized into six readiness domains, the session aims to help participants develop a practical, data-driven approach that supports student learning and academic integrity while managing the changing landscape of faculty and staff work. Participants will also have the opportunity to complete a brief AI readiness and risk survey, which offers a diagnostic starting point for administrative or department heads, program or staff leaders, and task force members.
Speakers
NH

Nakia Hamlett-Nunes

Connecticut College
Saturday October 17, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

1:00pm EDT

Beyond the Blue Book: AI Simulations and the New Measure of Liberal Arts Learning
Saturday October 17, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Blaustein 210
From the ancient Greeks forward, liberal arts education has never been only about storing information. It has been about forming judgment through practice: rhetoric in the agora, philosophical dialogue, ethical deliberation, and the disciplined use of language in public life. Oratory, dialectic, and disputation were not simply ways of displaying knowledge, but of testing whether a person could think, respond, persuade, and act wisely in context. As generative AI unsettles traditional assessments, this older tradition becomes newly relevant. This presentation argues that AI-powered simulations can recover something essential to liberal arts learning by shifting assessment from static recall to situated performance. Using GENESIS as a case example, this talk will explore how conversational, competency-based simulations can make visible the capacities the liberal arts have long aimed to cultivate: judgment, communication, ethical reasoning, interpretive agility, and the ability to use language as action. Rather than abandoning the humanistic tradition, simulations may help us reclaim it in a new form.
Speakers
JD
Saturday October 17, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Blaustein 210
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

1:30pm EDT

Awaken the Liberal Arts: Responsible AI Ecosystem by Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Saturday October 17, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
"The sleep of liberal arts produces AI." At the opening of the previous symposium, the keynote speaker shrewdly put forward this statement, proposing the liberal arts education to stay awake in the age of AI. At Colby College, the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence endeavors to integrate the two, interrogating and experimenting a liberal arts education organically intertwined with AI. In collaboration with academic and administrative departments across campus, Colby has initiated a responsible AI ecosystem for research, learning, and entrepreneurship. We are developing a multitude of AI programming by situating faculty, students, and staff at the center, while piloting privacy preserving and cost-effective technical infrastructure for campus use. During this session, we will share our approach to a responsible AI ecosystem, attempting to carve out a space and time for the audience to think through a practical AI integration in the context of their home institution.
Speakers
MZ

Mingwei Zhu

AI Applications Engineer, Colby College
Position at Company ABC.
Saturday October 17, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Innovations

1:30pm EDT

Vibe Coding the Liberal Arts: From Plain Language to Playable Simulation
Saturday October 17, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein 210
Vibe coding — building working software through natural-language conversation with AI rather than traditional programming — has quietly removed the technical barrier that once kept faculty and students from creating their own interactive learning tools. This session embodies the symposium's central paradox: the same capability that lets a student generate code without understanding it can let a humanities professor build a simulation that finally makes an abstract concept click. In thirty minutes, participants watch a fully playable classroom simulation emerge live from a plain-language prompt, then interrogate what that means for learning. When a literature, economics, or government instructor can prototype a simulation in minutes, who is doing the thinking — and is that a problem or a breakthrough? Participants leave with a shared, honest framework for deciding when vibe-coded simulations deepen understanding and when they short-circuit it.
Speakers
FI
Saturday October 17, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein 210
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

2:15pm EDT

A Scalable AI Course Redesign Protocol
Saturday October 17, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into higher education has created an urgent and widespread need for course redesign, yet most institutions lack the time, funding, and staffing to support faculty at scale. This presentation introduces a structured, AI-assisted course redesign protocol developed at the Yale School of Public Health to address this gap. Designed to be completed in a single two-hour sitting, the protocol guides faculty through a ten-step process that audits learning objectives, assesses AI substitution risk at the assessment level, redesigns for process visibility, authentic student thinking, optional AI integration, and generates ready-to-use syllabus language — all without altering the fundamental nature or intent of the course. Early piloting with YSPH faculty has yielded consistently positive responses, with participants reporting renewed confidence and inspiration around assessment redesign. Attendees will leave with a replicable framework they can adapt and deploy at their own institutions.
Speakers
avatar for Mike Honsberger

Mike Honsberger

Director of Academic Affairs, Yale School of Public Health
Saturday October 17, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

2:15pm EDT

Plot Twist: Unexpected Findings from Student AI Use at Denison
Saturday October 17, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
At a time when headlines suggest AI use among students is rapidly accelerating, Denison University’s second How I GenAI survey revealed a more complicated (and surprising) story. This session explores unexpected findings about how students are actually engaging with generative AI, including shifts in usage patterns, student concerns, trust, academic integration, and evolving attitudes toward AI tools.Alongside survey insights, we’ll highlight initiatives from Denison’s AI Student Ambassador program, where students are helping shape campus conversations around AI literacy, responsible use, creativity, and career readiness. Through peer-led programming and collaborative experimentation, students are playing an active role in defining what thoughtful AI engagement can look like at a liberal arts institution.Participants will leave with practical ideas for gathering student input, designing student-centered AI initiatives, and creating spaces where students can critically and creatively engage with emerging technologies in meaningful and values-driven ways.
Speakers
avatar for Heath Hase

Heath Hase

Associate Vice President of Digital Innovation, Denison University
Heath Hase’s distinguished career in academic technologies and IT leadership has spanned key roles at esteemed institutions such as Southeast Missouri State University, the University of North Carolina, William Jewell College, and Denison University. Recognized by Apple as a Distinguished... Read More →
avatar for Lori Robbins

Lori Robbins

Head of AI Strategy, Denison University
Lori Robbins is Denison University's Head of AI Strategy, where she leads campus-wide initiatives focused on AI literacy and professional development. With a background in international education and educational technology, she creates programs that help students, faculty, and staff... Read More →
Saturday October 17, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

2:45pm EDT

A Capabilities-Based Approach to Figuring Out Teaching and Learning in the Age of AI
Saturday October 17, 2026 2:45pm - 3:15pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
AI provides an unmatched opportunity for both accelerating and degrading high quality learning. Institutions of higher education must adapt by providing guidance to faculty and students across all departments; integrating AI literacy into the larger curricula rather than only covering it in specific computer science courses. In order to most effectively plan and evaluate these actions, we argue institutions implement a capabilities-based framework that understands faculty and students in terms of their capacities and functions in relation to existing college missions to produce socially and intellectually responsible graduates. The four capabilities—Access, Association, Involvement, and Literacy—give faculty, staff, and students a shared scaffolding and vocabulary for preserving the cognitive work genuine learning requires. We illustrate this recommendation through concrete examples across disciplines and work with the audience to brainstorm how they can apply this framework to their own classrooms and institutions.
Speakers
avatar for Cade Puzon

Cade Puzon

5th Year Fellow, Colby College
Saturday October 17, 2026 2:45pm - 3:15pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

2:45pm EDT

Understanding and Leveraging Student Ambivalence to AI
Saturday October 17, 2026 2:45pm - 3:15pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
In this presentation, I'll review the recent data on student attitudes towards AI, which show consistent negative trends in students optimism that AI will make their lives better and their belief that AI itself is ultimately a positive force in the world. I'll then discuss the challenges and opportunities that these trends present for liberal arts faculty and institutions. I'll argue that, within a curriculum that prioritizes critical thinking and open discussion, students' growing antipathy towards AI can be a strength, because it makes them more resilient the totalizing narratives around AI promoted by technology companies and the media, and it makes them more likely to scrutinize their own AI use.
Speakers
GC

George Cusack

Director of Academic AI Initiatives, Carleton College
Saturday October 17, 2026 2:45pm - 3:15pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

3:30pm EDT

Developing an AI-Focused Faculty Learning Community (FLC)
Saturday October 17, 2026 3:30pm - 4:00pm EDT
Blaustein 210
What is a faculty learning community (FLC)? Why is this model so relevant for the topic of AI and the Liberal Arts? This session proposes to answer these questions by introducing the FLC model, which brings together faculty and staff in a community of practice, and to argue for its relevance as a means of fostering interdisciplinary and collaborative connections, debates, and discussions, as well as practical outputs, in relation to the role of AI in higher education and more specifically in the Liberal Arts. Through a demonstration of how to form an AI-focused FLC, interactive activities, and shared resources, this session will leave the audience with the means of forming their own AI-focused FLCs at their home institutions, as well as giving audience members the opportunity to connect with colleagues from a variety of institutions who plan to undertake this same goal.
Speakers
EB

Elisabeth Buzay

Visiting Assistant Professor - Francophone Studies, Trinity College
Elisabeth Herbst Buzay is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies at Trinity College. Her research focuses on topics including multimedia medievalism and extraordinary communication, in works ranging from French Medieval literature to contemporary French fantasy works... Read More →
Saturday October 17, 2026 3:30pm - 4:00pm EDT
Blaustein 210
  Teach the Room, Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Innovations

3:30pm EDT

The Student Voice: Creating an AI Student Council
Saturday October 17, 2026 3:30pm - 4:00pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
As noted at last year’s conference, liberal arts colleges are in a unique and important position to tackle AI and its effect on higher education. A key facet of this position is our ability to encourage critical thinking in our students across a variety of courses, research, and leadership positions on campus. To that end, and as my institutions continues to grapple with its response to generative AI, I formed an AI student council. The AI student council helps develop programming for students, serves as a sounding board for policies and procedures, and helps with communication. The council serves a complement to the AI Community Council, which brings in professionals, alumni, and other friends of the college, into conversation with Eckerd faculty and staff. This presentation talks about why and how to form the student council, setting goals and objectives for the council, and key takeaways.
Speakers
avatar for Alexis Ramsey-Tobienne

Alexis Ramsey-Tobienne

Assistant Dean for AI and Learning Integrity, Eckerd College
Alexis E. Ramsey-Tobienne is the Assistant Dean for Artificial Intelligence and Learning Integrity and the Director of Writing at Eckerd College, St.
Petersburg, FL where she helped launch a new AI studies minor. She also oversees the college's Academic Honor Council and serves on the General Education Committe. Her work examines the intersections of Artificial Intelligence, Faculty Development, Academic Integrity, and Writing... Read More →
Saturday October 17, 2026 3:30pm - 4:00pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

3:30pm EDT

What If We Trusted Them? Student-Led AI Research as Liberal Arts Pedagogy — Lessons from the LAB
Saturday October 17, 2026 3:30pm - 4:00pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
What if we trusted them? As institutions scramble to regulate AI, students are positioned as potential cheaters rather than intellectual partners. But Gen Z sentiment toward AI has shifted—many students arrive determined to protect learning, effort, and authentic thinking. This presentation shares what happened when we took that seriously. Over three semesters, we transformed our Language Center into The LAB—a student-led research hub where multilingual students investigate AI's impact on language and meaning-making. Students led every stage: interviewing and hiring peer researchers, organizing our Active Language Forum, shaping research agendas. The results exceeded expectations. LAB students presented research rivaling graduate work. In my Literature and Media Transformation course—which emerged from LAB conversations—students wrote media autobiographies of stunning honesty. When we opened new LAB applications, we received unprecedented, and  ambitious proposals revealing how hungry this generation is for these conversations. This presentation offers a replicable model for  institutions willing to trust students as co-creators of knowledge. When we give students agency, they lead.
Speakers
SK

Stephanie Kufner

Professor of German |Academic Director Bard LC, Bard College
Saturday October 17, 2026 3:30pm - 4:00pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

4:00pm EDT

ChatGBC: An All-Campus, Secure, Affordable(?) OpenWebUI/OpenRouter-Based AI Hub
Saturday October 17, 2026 4:00pm - 4:30pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
In a world where students are increasingly expected to graduate with AI experience, providing equitable, affordable and safe access to AI models is becoming a tricky problem for colleges and universities.  This session will cover the creation of ChatGBC, Gettysburg College's OpenWebUI/OpenRouter based AI hub.  ChatGBC gives all campus members access to multiple AI models plus a built in RAG knowledge base, maintains control of the data submitted to AI models and is reasonably affordable and supportable for a small liberal arts college.   We'll cover initial setup, beta testing, scaling for the entire campus, initial faculty and student feedback and data on costs and support requirements.
Speakers
ER

Eric Remy

Gettysburg College
Saturday October 17, 2026 4:00pm - 4:30pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

4:00pm EDT

Student Involvement in AI Curriculum Development
Saturday October 17, 2026 4:00pm - 4:30pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
As artificial intelligence rapidly evolves, liberal arts institutions face a pressing challenge: how do we swiftly update our curricula to meet the demands of students, parents, and employers across nearly all academic domains? Traditional curriculum development can be slow, but the pace of AI requires agility. A solution is an underutilized resource: our students. They bring unique expertise and lived experiences that can drive curricular innovation.This presentation explores three distinct collaborative structures we implemented to partner students with faculty to develop and revise AI-related curricula.  We have successfully used these models to co-create curricular materials across disciplines, including creative writing, economics, sociology, cognitive science, and ethics. By leveraging these partnerships, institutions can design course materials that are deeply engaging to students, while allowing faculty to gain vital insights into how students actually interact with AI. When using this approach, both sides of the partnership benefit.  Faculty evolve their approach to AI, and students' involvement in curriculum development changes how they approach learning.
Speakers
WW

Willie Wilson

Associate Professor of Computer Science, Franklin & Marshall College
I am trying to guide our campus in ethical AI practices.  I have been working with students, faculty, and staff to educate them on AI, its strengths, and its weaknesses.  I'm also listening to their concerns and how they would like to use AI.

Students, faculty, staff, and administration all have different needs and objectives. Also, faculty from STEM and humanities usually have vastly different experiences with AI and are taking very different approaches. I'm looking to talk with people about how to get people on the same... Read More →
Saturday October 17, 2026 4:00pm - 4:30pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

4:00pm EDT

The AI Culture Question: What Happens When One Department Decides to Lead?
Saturday October 17, 2026 4:00pm - 4:30pm EDT
Blaustein 210
When AI arrived on campus, most institutions responded the same way: individual faculty experimenting in isolation, policy committees deliberating, and a general sense of productive chaos. At Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the Digital Learning Center took a different path: restructuring one role to make AI integration its central focus, then building outward from there. In this interactive session, participants will explore how a single department can catalyze institution-wide AI culture change without a massive budget or a dedicated AI office. Drawing on initiatives including a faculty Community of Practice, a BoodleBox pilot, and intentional strategies for amplifying student voice, this session offers a replicable framework for moving from scattered experimentation to coordinated community effort. Participants will leave with concrete strategies they can adapt to their own institutional contexts and the conviction that meaningful, human-centered AI integration is within reach, regardless of institutional size or resources.
Speakers
SG
Saturday October 17, 2026 4:00pm - 4:30pm EDT
Blaustein 210
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element
 

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Friday, October 16
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Blaustein 203
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Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
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Crozier-Williams 1962 Room
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