We’re less than a week away from this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) 10-day takeover of Austin. Four new featured speaker sessions have been added to the SXSW EDU program, a component of the festival, and the closing keynote discussion panel has been revealed.

The final March 2 announcement focuses on hyper-relevant educational topics, including school safety and improving teacher recruitment and retention. Previous announcements included keynote addresses from Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert and team members who worked on the James Webb Space Telescope. There have also been two rounds of music showcase announcements, culminating in a list of nearly 500 performances.

The closing keynote address, Safer Schools: Students, Educators, & Mental Health One Year After Uvalde, will feature Lives Robbed president Kimberly Mata-Rubio, Odis Johnson Jr, executive director of Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools at Johns Hopkins University, Nick Allen, Ann Swindells Professor of Clinical Psychology for the Center for Digital Mental Health at the University of Oregon, and Texas Tribune editor in chief Sewell Chan.

The four newly-added featured sessions are:

• Fostering the Next Generation of Storytellers: a dialogue focused on overcoming adversity led by 9B Collective Studio CEO Phillip Boutté Jr, 9B Collective Studio concept artist Mike Uwandi, and BRIC Foundation co-founders Nicole Hendrix and Alison Mann
• Raise the Bar to Elevate & Diversify the Teaching Profession: a discussion about the teacher pipeline led by the current U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel A. Cardona, president and CEO of The Hunt Institute Javaid Siddiqi, and Paul Quinn College president Michael Sorrell.
• Supporting HBCUs for Equity in Education & Beyond: an exploration on how nonprofits and corporations alike must work together on education equity; guided by Student Freedom Initiative (SFI) executive director Mark Brown, executive director of the Southern Communities Initiative Mambu Sherman, and Bennett College president Suzanne Walsh.
• Teaching & Learning in the Age of AI: What's Next?: a conversation on the future of AI in educational spaces; featuring John Bailey, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Terah Lyons, fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and Code.org president Cameron Wilson.

The latest announcement also revealed a special March 8 International Women’s Day social: Women That Flex: Celebrating Women Leaders with Far Reaching Impact. Though this event hasn’t released a full speaker lineup, we do know two powerful executives that will be featured: Kendra Scott and SchooLinks founder and CEO Katie Fang.

The full announcement and more information about the featured sessions can be found at sxswedu.org.