Adapting to new technologies is a staple of academic life, but the rapid rise of generative AI is creating an unsustainable mental and emotional landscape for faculty and librarians. Beyond the daunting technical learning curve and the exhausting game of “whack-a-mole” as AI “assistants” pop up in familiar tools, this shift brings profound existential repercussions. Ethical dilemmas and the relentless pressure to innovate while maintaining pedagogical integrity have pushed many to a breaking point.Together, we will situate AI burnout within the broader cultural context of higher education while reflecting on our personal and professional values. Through prompts, small-group discussions, and personal inventories, participants will identify current challenges, discover areas of agency, and find sparks of hope and inspiration.
Irene McGarrity is Head of Research Services at Mount Holyoke College, where she leads a team of four research and instruction librarians. She holds an MSIS in Information Studies, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing, and an MA in English Literature. Irene has presented regionally... Read More →
The rise of generative AI has disrupted the "finished essay" as a proxy for critical thinking, creating a profound paradox: tools that mimic analysis threaten to hollow out the very processes they simulate. This session proposes a shift from "policing output" to "partnering in process." Moving beyond surveillance-based integrity models, we explore how to evolve the Honor Code into a proactive pedagogical contract. By emphasizing "Process-Oriented Pedagogy"—including the use of prompt logs, iterative drafting, and reflective AI-critique—we can restore the human element to the center of the curriculum. This session explores a "tiered transparency" model that allows for varying levels of AI integration, encouraging students to navigate the generative era with agency and intellectual honesty. Participants will leave with a framework to move their classrooms from a state of suspicion toward a "covenant of transparency" that preserves the core values of a liberal arts education.
Associate Professor, Community College of Rhode Island
With extensive experience teaching across Northeast colleges over the past 25 years, Alyson Snowe brings a profound understanding to the English Department at CCRI, where she's been since 2018. Holding a Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island, Dr. Snowe teaches diverse courses... Read More →
As colleges and universities grapple with the opportunities and tensions surrounding artificial intelligence, many institutional conversations occur without substantial student input. At Gettysburg College, we sought to address this gap by inviting students to become co-designers of our emerging AI initiatives through a series of design thinking workshops titled Designing the Future of AI at Gettysburg College. These sessions guided students through empathy-building, problem framing, ideation, and rapid prototyping activities designed to surface their experiences, concerns, hopes, and ideas regarding AI's role in teaching and learning.In this interactive workshop, participants will experience an adapted version of the process used with Gettysburg students while examining insights generated through these sessions. Attendees will leave with practical facilitation strategies, adaptable activity structures, and a replicable model for engaging students as partners in shaping institutional responses to AI. Rather than designing for students, participants will explore what becomes possible when institutions design with them.
Richard Russell is a professor of psychology at Gettysburg College. Trained in cognitive science, he discovered and named super-recognizers, people with exceptional ability to recognize faces. He is now working on humanistic, cybernetic, and cognitive science approaches to understanding... Read More →
Can an AI play a video game? This workshop uses that deceptively simple question to explore one of the deepest paradoxes AI poses to liberal arts education: the difference between knowing about an experience and living it. Drawing on a Francophone video game course taught at UMass Amherst featuring Valiant Hearts, Life is Strange True Colors, and Under the Waves, this session demonstrates how AI tools become most pedagogically powerful not when they succeed, but when they fail. Participants will experience firsthand how ChatGPT, Gemini, Mistral AI, and Copilot generate fluent yet experientially hollow analyses of games they have never played and how students, as actual players, are uniquely positioned to identify, contest, and surpass those analyses. This "player vs. machine" dynamic transforms AI from a threat to academic integrity into a catalyst for embodied critical thinking, intercultural analysis, and genuine French language engagement.
This hands-on workshop uses a tabletop role-playing game format to build practical AI literacy in an engaging, low-stakes environment. Participants take on characters facing real-world scenarios, such as drafting a research paper, responding to a workplace email, evaluating a suspicious source, and must decide how, when, and whether to use AI tools to help. Dice rolls and simple game mechanics introduce chance and consequence (a "critical fail" might mean an AI hallucination slips into a report; a "success" might mean catching a bias in a generated summary), turning abstract concepts like ethical decision-making, verification, bias, and academic integrity into lived experience rather than lecture material.
At Amherst College, Mead Art Museum and Academic Technology Services work to apply innovative applications of technology including enhancement of digital accessibility. Emerging AI technology has recently brought us together in collaboration focused on making the Mead’s digital collection more searchable, discoverable and accessible through the production of multimodal collection descriptions.In this workshop, we share an activity we have developed with relevance to art pedagogy in the classroom: inviting community members to critically evaluate the technology’s potential for good when responsibly applied to a specific context, and to lend their voices to make a direct impact. Participants may bring their own device to try the activities themselves.Our larger project centers student engagement and participation in developing the project’s workflow and evaluation. We will discuss how to further trustworthy museum metadata, how to facilitate critical evaluation of the potential benefits from AI applications, and propose models for peer institutions.
Prakhar is a rising junior at Amherst College, pursuing a triple major in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Economics. He is deeply interested in leveraging emerging technologies to solve interdisciplinary challenges and advance accessibility initiatives. With experience working... Read More →
Andres is a rising sophomore at Amherst College, pursuing a double major in English and Mathematics. He is curious about the applications of AI in a range of fields, including museums. He is passionate about channeling his curiosity of AI into learning about the various ways by which... Read More →
Doug Hall provides support across the disciplines for academic research computing and emerging technologies. This includes pedagogy-driven consultation and workshops for high performance computing and artificial intelligence applications. He has a Ph.D. in Polymer Science and Engineering... Read More →
Manager of Collections Access and Academic Engagement, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College
Dr. Miloslava Hruba is an accomplished museum professional and researcher dedicated to bridging the intersections of art collections, pedagogy, and digital accessibility. Her current work focuses on the ethical integration of generative AI within academic programming, exploring how... Read More →
This workshop is designed for educators who want to help students learn how to formulate meaningful questions as researchers and thinkers in the liberal arts while creating classroom spaces where critical engagement with AI can occur.First we will share artifacts from Pratt Institute classrooms that highlight faculty and student exploration of new forms of inquiry. Second, we will introduce conceptual maps created within our faculty learning community as tools for “charting new courses” in an AI-infused educational landscape. Together, these artifacts model an open, experimental, and collaborative approach to learning that prioritizes process over product and illuminates the power of the human dimension of education in response to the current technological shift. After discussing these materials, participants will engage in a conceptual mapping activity adapted from our faculty learning community, followed by reflection and assessment exercises that can be applied in their own teaching contexts.
This workshop is for any instructor who has sat in front of a paper wondering whether the words on the page truly represent the work of the student who submitted it. How do we preserve the valuable intellectual work fostered by extended writing projects while maintaining confidence that the submissions we receive reflect what students can actually do? Some instructors seek certainty by moving most writing into the classroom; this workshop explores another approach: building confidence in out-of-class work through low-stakes in-class activities that provide meaningful checkpoints for student capabilities. Starting from the question “What evidence would help me determine whether this student wrote this paper?,” participants will identify the evidence they wish they had and work backward to design activities that generate it. Participants will leave with a collaboratively developed collection of activities that offer snapshots of current student abilities while doubling as scaffolding for learning.
Navigating generative AI in a liberal arts context requires breaking traditional silos to foster campus-wide dialogue. In this interactive workshop, leaders from Smith College share a collaborative framework developed with the Student Government Association and the Sherrerd Center for Teaching and Learning. This partnership bridges the faculty-student divide through an automated syllabus AI policy generator, student-led residential and classroom discussions, and a faculty learning cohort. After a brief showcase of these initiatives, participants will transition into an active session. Working in small groups, attendees will analyze their own institutional ecosystems, identify cross-departmental partnership opportunities and co-design a low-stakes AI literacy project tailored to their home campuses.
Director of Learning, Research and Technology, Smith College
Jean Ferguson is the Director of Learning Research and Technology at Smith College, a joint appointment between the Libraries and Information Technology Services. In this role, she leads a team of instructional technologists, media producers, research librarians, and a scholarly communications... Read More →
Associate Director, Learning Research & Technology, Smith College
Travis is the Associate Director of Learning Research & Technology at Smith College, and is committed to empowering faculty to learn and adopt new instructional technologies in ways that best meet their teaching objectives. He has experience teaching undergraduate classes in blended... Read More →
