Generative Futures at Colorado College
A Mellon-funded initiative exploring how language, interpretation, and generative Artificial Intelligence are reshaping teaching, learning, and knowledge across the liberal arts.
Critical Language Inquiry in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Generative Futures begins from a humanities-driven conviction: meaning does not simply appear. It emerges through language broadly understood—through words, images, sounds, code, and other symbolic systems through which we think, learn, teach, and create.
In an era of seemingly effortless answers, Generative Futures restores the productive friction of interpretation, debate, and reflection that deepens knowledge and fuels critical inquiry and creative problem solving. We invite shared inquiry about teaching, learning, and the work of knowledge-making itself.
Designed for faculty across all divisions, the initiative centers Critical Language Inquiry and Critical AI Literacy to ask how language shapes meaning, identity, power, and communication across disciplines, and how liberal arts inquiry can guide more just, inclusive, and responsible engagement with emerging technologies.
Ways to Get Involved
The most immediate ways to join Generative Futures during Spring and Summer 2026 are through the Educator Development Day and two cross-campus Summer Reading Groups for faculty. These are designed as low-barrier entry points: places to experiment with emerging questions, build shared vocabulary, and explore classroom-ready ideas with colleagues across the college.
Faculty participating in these workshops and reading groups become eligible to apply for Generative Futures course development grants.
Why This Matters Now
Language lies at the foundation of how humans understand and share knowledge. It shapes how ideas are formed, how evidence is communicated, how identities are named, and how power moves through institutions, disciplines, and everyday life.
Generative AI makes those longstanding questions newly urgent. Because contemporary AI systems are built from, trained on, and generative of linguistic patterns, they call renewed attention to interpretation, translation, context, and the values embedded in communication. In a moment that often promises frictionless access to knowledge, Generative Futures restores the productive friction of reflection, debate, and inquiry.
This initiative asks not only how meaning is made, but how language can preserve, alter, and flatten difference, reinforce systems of power or open possibilities for resistance, solidarity, and belonging. It creates space for faculty to dwell in those questions together and to bring that reflection into teaching practice.
For Faculty Across the College
Generative Futures is intentionally cross-divisional. Its questions belong not only to the humanities, but to every field in which language, evidence, communication, and interpretation matter.
Language encompasses the broader symbolic systems through which knowledge travels: spoken and written words, images, sounds, notation, visual design, code—all the varieties that shape our fields and communities. Whether your work centers texts, data, performance, laboratory practice, mathematical reasoning, visual analysis, or collaborative inquiry, this initiative offers a place to think with colleagues across the college about how meaning takes shape in your field.
Two Overlapping and Developing Frameworks
Generative Futures treats Critical Language Inquiry and Critical AI Literacy as developing frameworks. Through iteration in teaching, research, and presentation, faculty and students will help shape what these terms come to mean on our campus over the course of time.
Critical Language Inquiry (CLI) approaches language as a site of complexity, multiplicity, and power. Drawing on methods from the humanities, CLI understands language as socially constructed, heterogeneous, and shaped by diverse histories, communities, and forms of expression. It asks how language creates and negotiates knowledge, identity, norms, and values, and how it can both reinforce systems of exclusion and open possibilities for resistance, solidarity, and belonging. In doing so, CLI invites faculty and students to examine how meaning is constructed in our languaged world and to cultivate the habits of attention, context, and critical reflection central to liberal arts learning.
Critical AI Literacy (CAIL) examines the design, use, and consequences of AI through humanistic inquiry. In the context of Generative Futures, it asks how generative AI systems shape the production, interpretation, and circulation of language, and how issues of bias, inequality, labor, and environmental impact are embedded in their development and use. CAIL also invites reflection on how these systems influence human thinking and knowledge creation, helping learners engage AI with discernment, responsibility, and an awareness of its broader social consequences.
In dialogue, CLI and CAIL bring language and AI into sustained conversation. Rather than separating technological questions from humanistic ones, Generative Futures asks how human and machine systems alike participate in the making of meaning and how that changing relationship shapes our teaching, research, and shared intellectual life.
Looking Ahead
Faculty across the college are invited to engage CLI and CAIL through programs tied to Generative Futures, including workshops, educator development days, learning communities, and reading groups. These low-barrier entry points are meant to build shared vocabulary, surface emerging questions, and support classroom practice.
Faculty will also be able to apply for Course Development Grants to create or revise courses that foreground CLI or engage the stakes of generative AI. Participation in Generative Futures programming will be required for eligibility, helping ensure that this work grows from shared frameworks rather than standardized content.
Additional upcoming opportunities include creating or adopting portable CAIL modules—adaptable teaching units that approach generative AI through humanistic inquiry—and mentoring Student-Faculty Summer Research Projects on language, power, and technology.
Connect with the team (generativefutures@coloradocollege.edu) to learn about these and other opportunities as they emerge!