Kidsburgh’s PAA team and other local educators will share wisdom at this year’s SXSW EDU

For more than a decade, dozens of educators from the Pittsburgh region have traveled annually to Austin, Texas, to attend the South By Southwest EDU festival. The festival, referred to simply as SXSW EDU, is major national celebration of innovation in the education industry.

It happens each March in the days leading up to the global SXSW festival, which celebrates innovation in areas including music, film and technology. And during these first few education-focused days of SXSW, Kidsburgh is excited to be hosting a panel that features our multi-year Parents as Allies (PAA) family-school engagement project.

Last year, we hosted a panel called How to Build Trust & Sustainable Family-School Engagement. This year’s PAA panel is called Inspiring Action: A Guidebook to Family-School Engagement.

During our panel, the director of Kidsburgh and PAA, Yu-Ling Cheng, will interview two people who have been instrumental in the success of PAA: our research partner Emily Morris from the Brookings Institution and South Fayette School District’s director of diversity, equity and inclusion, Dr. Chuck Herring, who has helped lead South Fayette’s PAA team.

“Pittsburgh has always been a city of builders and innovators — from steel to meds/eds, and from meds/eds to tech, we’ve consistently reinvented ourselves,” Herring says. “When our educators share their unique perspectives at SXSW EDU, they’re not just exporting Pittsburgh’s educational approach; they’re creating a two-way street of inspiration.”

Herring will share with the audience about the experience of connecting families with their schools in powerful new ways. He, Cheng and Morris will also lead their audience through some of the human-centered design exercise used by PAA teams in the Pittsburgh area, giving them a first-hand experience of this technique.

“Parents as Allies is transforming the old ‘parent-teacher conference’ model into something that actually works! What gets me excited is seeing families and schools become genuine partners rather than occasional acquaintances. When parents step into their power as co-educators, magic happens — student engagement soars, learning deepens, and those achievement gaps we’ve struggled with for decades begin to close,” Herring says.

“What I’ve learned is that authentic family engagement isn’t about check-boxes or attendance at school events — it’s about creating spaces where parents’ voices truly matter in shaping their children’s educational journey. And the beautiful thing? This work doesn’t require massive budgets or policy overhauls — just a willingness to reimagine what’s possible when we truly collaborate.”

Additional SXSW EDU events hosted by Pittsburgh organizations include:

World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh: Youth-Adult Partnership for Inclusive Decision-Making. Kidsburgh teen reporter Morgan McCray will be co-hosting this panel with Natalia Connor and Julia Tracy of the World Affairs Council. They will explore power, decision making and systems change through an interactive simulation, then invite their audience to examine how the simulation outcome was impacted by the inclusion/exclusion of different groups in the decision-making process. In discussing the simulation, McCray, Connor and Tracy will draw parallels to our real-world systems. They will also examine the concept of youth voice, why youth voice is important for equitable dialogue/decision-making, and resources to amplify youth voice.

Maker Educator Meet Up: Agency by Design. Northgate School District’s director of partnerships and equity, Jeff Evancho, will co-host this maker-centered gathering with Paula Mitchell from Agency by Design Oakland. Visitors will share tools, practices, and stories. This open-ended experience offers low-tech and high-tech choose-your-own-adventure options to tinker, design, and forge new friendships in the vibrant maker-sphere. The goal? To learn, connect and build community.

For all of these Pittsburgh educators, SXSW EDU is a great opportunity.

“By connecting with global innovators, we bring fresh thinking back to our region while showing the world how the ‘Burgh does education,” Herring says. “It’s like synergistic, cross-pollination for the mind—we all grow better when we grow together. And let’s be honest, in today’s rapidly changing world, the educator who stops learning is the educator who stops having a positive impact on the community.”