AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 16, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The South by Southwest EDU^® Conference & Festival^® is proud to announce the addition of 187 sessions to its 2025 programming. Selected through the community-driven  PanelPicker^® process, which received more than 1,400 submissions, these sessions represent more than a dozen countries and a wide range of education initiatives, innovations, challenges, and influences to be addressed throughout the conference and festival, which runs from March 3-6, 2025.

Topics that emerged as top-of-mind for the community range from ethical AI application and strengthening talent pipelines, to rising areas of interest such as non-traditional learning spaces and enhancing opportunities for neurodivergent students and educators. The chosen sessions will fall across the SXSW EDU Conference & Festival’s 12 tracks, with Teaching & Learning, Community Initiatives, and Leadership for Tomorrow leading the way in terms of number of sessions aligned to these tracks.

“This is always an exciting time since this signals the focus of this year’s programming and is a telling sign of where education stands and may be headed,” said Greg Rosenbaum, vice president of SXSW EDU. “Since we launched SXSW EDU 15 years ago, education has been at the center of topical issues, whether that be tech, arts, policy, or social movements. That’s why SXSW EDU has always been a great precursor to the larger SXSW Conference & Festivals. But more than ever, education is confronting the growing intersectionality of these areas and the many perspectives it takes to improve the individualization of education needs. The sessions unveiled today for our 2025 event particularly reflect this trend, standing out from previous years.”

This year’s initial program brings together 449 speakers, including Spelman College Provost Pamela E. Scott-Johnson, Ph.D., NASA’s Holly Ridings, contemporary artist and illustrator Nikkolas Smith, and First Amendment attorney Dan Novack. Sessions will feature leaders throughout a variety of fields as they participate in panels, workshops, conversations and several other session formats. Highlights of the selected sessions include but are not limited to:

Teaching & Learning

• Reach for the Green Light: Gatsby, Literary Theory, & AI: This workshop will lead attendees through an exercise on how to use AI-generated literary criticism to augment student understanding and analysis.
• The Art of Empathy: NYU x Whitney Museum Collaboration: Speakers will guide you through a visionary curriculum that emphasizes engaging with art to learn and leverage skills of observation, interpretation, perspective believing, and engaged curiosity to bring empathy training to institutions.

Community Initiatives

• How Sport Can Ignite Change Alongside Schools & Communities: Learn about Sport for Good Cities, an approach to collective action from the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation.
• Defending the Right to Read: Working Together: Dive into the heart of the battle for freedom of expression and explore the vital importance of defending the right to read against censorship.

Leadership for Tomorrow

• Innovation & Change in Higher Education: Speakers will offer specific examples of innovations and changes in higher education that are being implemented at several institutions to meet the challenges that lie ahead.
• Making Standards Worth Teaching To: Hear how national education leaders at the helm of some of the largest professional associations are pioneering efforts to build data science as a first-of-its-kind cross-subject discipline.

Other Highlights

• Neurodiverse Educators, Learners, & Families Meet Up: Network with educators, students, and families to discuss ways that neurocognitive abilities can be highlighted.
• Rural Renaissance: Building Tech Talent Outside City Limits: Join for a conversation with experts from philanthropy, policy, and education to learn about the need to tackle urban-rural disparities in modern workforce development.

Attendees will also have the opportunity to explore the power of partnerships, specifically, localized community partnerships designed to bring collective change to talent pipelines. Sessions include:

• Chicago: A Windy City Breakthrough: Data to Drive Youth Progress: A Better Chicago’s new tool – the Youth Opportunity Dashboard – measuring Chicago’s efforts through critical youth outcomes, empowering civic leaders and youth-serving organizations to inform their investments and efforts that produce systemic change.
• Cleveland: Cleveland’s Collective Impact Approach to Career Pathways: Greater Cleveland Career Consortium (GCCC) is aligning the education and workforce systems by convening hundreds of cross-sector partners to implement a 6-12 grade career exploration and readiness curriculum. Partners will detail implementation at scale, serving 30,000 students in 11 low-income school districts.

For the full list of speakers and sessions, visit schedule.sxswedu.com.

About SXSW EDU:
Now in its 15th year, the SXSW EDU^® Conference & Festival reflects the world’s most critical social issues as seen through the lens of education. This year’s event will bring together the learner, the practitioner, the entrepreneur, and the visionary to share their groundbreaking stories, tackle complex issues, and build reimagined paths forward. As a community of diverse people who are united around a like-minded vision for the future, SXSW EDU serves as a place for attendees to renew their purpose in practice from both a personal and professional perspective. It is a place to reinforce the core principles of teaching and learning as well as an opportunity to express your creativity and passion for education. Join the passionate and innovative community at SXSW EDU, March 3-6, 2025.

For more information, please visit sxswedu.com.