GTI Axis Summit

Today’s world is rapidly changing. New trends, processes and systems are being developed at a phenomenal pace. To keep pace teachers, schools and organisations must collaborate to bring a new educational story to reality. Each year GTI is committed to hosting a multi-day convergence of students, teachers and education leaders from throughout South Africa and around the world.

Through a series of concurrent events each tailored to a particular audience (e.g. pre-service teachers) that culminates in the cross-cutting Axis Forum, the Summit aims to allow educators at any stage in their career an opportunity to develop, collaborate, across age and professional and work towards a new vision for education with other educational stakeholders. The Summit is organised by GTI in collaboration with a number of partners and sponsors who with the following aims:

To share, learn and grow with their peers and master educators from around the world.
To reflect deeply on teaching practices while developing the necessary skills for transformative 21st-century teaching.
To share and integrate effective practices into broader national education policy decisions.
To give leaders a greater understanding of themselves and their personal and professional motives and how to use oneself as an instrument of leadership in the 21st century.
To engage in dynamic conversations and create new platforms and initiatives to drive educational transformation.

The GTI Axis Summit is designed as a community of practice, where all voices are valued, encouraged to participate, and where every attendee can make a meaningful contribution. A place where everyone is an expert, and experienced practitioners and novices share and contribute to growing everyone’s body of knowledge.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual Axis Summit for 2020 did not take place. Instead, we hosted the GTI Future Leaders Imbizo. Our aim with this Imbizo was to provide opportunities for our student teachers, across all regions to collaborate and build relationships. The theme for the online Imbizo was Teachers: Leading in crisis, reimagining the future”, which was also the theme for World Teachers’ day.

Our last Summit took place from 2 to 4 July 2019 at the University of Johannesburg’s Funda Ujabule Primary School, the theme was: connect + create = change. The summit explored ways of turning classrooms into creative spaces for learning, and challenge participants to make these spaces sites where learners can connect both with each other and with the wider local and global communities in which they find themselves.

From the Summit, GTI released a series of 8 knowledge products aimed to equip educators to become active change agents in our schools, our communities, our country and the world at large. Click on the product below to download it.