In a move designed to set a new standard for AI engagement in higher education, the University of Virginia College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences (“the College”) and UVA Library have founded the AI Literacy and Action Lab (“the Lab”), a joint venture to equip the UVA community with capabilities and critical discernment needed to understand, navigate and integrate AI technologies across diverse disciplines.
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The Lab is grounded in a framework developed by Leo S. Lo, UVA University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, and adopted by peer institutions across the country. Programming in the Lab is organized around five linked competencies: technical knowledge, ethical awareness, critical thinking, practical skills and understanding AI’s societal impact.
“As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, genuine human intelligence will become increasingly more valuable—we owe it to our students and faculty to prepare them for this transformation,” said Christa Acampora, dean of the College. “This Lab is focused on learning, doing, and evaluating. It is a powerful example of how the liberal arts and sciences cultivate distinctive human capacities—such as reasoning, discerning, choosing, and creating—and hone them through concrete opportunities to advance knowledge, discovery, and creativity.”
The Lab will initially operate through faculty course pilots, a planned flagship one-credit seminar, a series of three one-credit courses, and an incubator pathway for projects that show promise beyond a single semester. This blend of a “train-the-trainer” approach and direct work with new users will accelerate AI literacy and ethical use across communities.
“We deliberately chose the word ‘action’ because people develop AI literacy not by attending workshops about AI, but by using the technology to advance work they care about and reflecting on what happened,” said Leo S. Lo. “The Lab gives everyone a shared vocabulary and framework for what AI literacy actually requires across disciplines.”
In one scenario, faculty will bring to the Lab a course, assignment or research project to be mapped against Dean Lo’s AI Literacy Framework and matched with University librarians who are trained facilitators in the five competencies. The facilitators serve as collaborative partners, complementing the faculty member’s disciplinary expertise with the critical and ethical dimensions the framework emphasizes. Throughout the course, students will work with their professors and facilitators to achieve each project’s planned goals. When the course wraps, students have tangible experience for their “portfolio,” faculty have assessment data about curricular impact and student growth, and every pilot produces a published case study with faculty co-authorship, contributing to a growing national evidence base.
Pilot Projects Demonstrate Potential for A Range of Disciplines
The first faculty course pilots launched this spring, with a total of four pilot projects underway.
- Pilot 1: Economics & the Future of Work: Launched spring 2026 by Anton Korinek – professor of Economics at the College and a member of the TIME100 AI – and three librarians, this course combined hands-on AI coding with training on critical thinking and AI’s ethical dimensions. Together, the class addressed what responsible AI tools look like in practice, supporting students as they develop original group projects analyzing how AI is reshaping employment, economic growth and inequality.
- Pilot 2: High Schools & Literature. In a second pilot launched this spring, students in a first-year writing course interviewed students and teachers at Monticello High School as part of a project exploring the impact of AI on teaching and learning. Working alongside their UVA professor, Piers Gelly, assistant professor of English, and Lab facilitators, the students considered what thoughtful AI integration looks like in the classroom as they developed original lesson plans for AP English and English 11 classes.
- Pilot 3: Philosophy & Society. In the fall semester, David Danks, Polk JSF Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, & Data Science, will guide student projects that apply philosophical ideas to real-world or potential uses of AI across society. The pilot will focus on helping students develop genuine comprehension and cognitive skills to critically evaluate and validate AI outputs.
- Pilot 4: AI Literacy & STEM. This fall 2026 pilot will partner Andreas Gahlmann, associate professor of Chemistry and Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics, with the Lab to integrate AI-scaffolded active learning into biochemistry courses. The project will also give the Lab a science anchor to complement its humanities and social sciences pilots as it builds toward institutional reach.
“The vision is for this to grow across all UVA schools and disciplines and eventually beyond Grounds,” said Lo. “Every project generates published evidence on how AI literacy develops across disciplines – evidence UVA uses and other universities can build on.”
Universities nationwide are responding to the need for AI literacy in a range of ways, including drop-in studios, resource centers, standalone courses, and research institutes. The Lab stands apart in what it produces: structured, evidence-based AI literacy development embedded directly into disciplinary work.
“From their beginnings, the liberal arts aimed at seeking knowledge, discerning fact from fiction, exploring what is good for us to do and how to live together, realizing beauty and its role in meaning, and understanding the richness and complexity of our emotional lives and how that serves as a basis for empathy. AI can bring that into sharper focus for us,” said Acampora. “The extent to which we develop that focus and use it as motivation for action will determine the extent to which AI can be harnessed to be responsive to human needs and possibilities. Our students will be leaders in exploring these critical questions.”
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