Dear Parents,
This week my Diploma students in their final year are busy presenting their final Theory of Knowledge (TOK) presentations. These presentations, which count 33% towards their final TOK grade, always remind me of how interesting and different the IB Curriculum is for students who are enrolled in any of the programmes on offer.
The TOK presentations encourage students to find a Real Life Situation (RLS) from a current event (found on the news or something they have read or seen) and then formulate a Knowledge Question which they need to explore using knowledge claims, TOK Ways of Knowing (WOKs) and Areas of Knowledge (AOKs). This all may sound all rather foreign but you have to really be able to see what these presentations look like to fully understand how the students go about making connections about knowledge; how do we know what we know, where it comes from, how we acquire it and how we make sense of it in a world with many different perspectives.
I love watching my students construct and deconstruct the various opinions, facts and fallacies about knowledge. I so enjoy watching them make claims about how they see the world and how they have grown by making solid academic arguments for each of their cases. In many respects they often come across as extremely knowledgeable on a topic that they wanted to explore. In the process they learn about getting a point across and bringing in all they have learnt from various subjects over their educational career.
This is the strength of an IB curriculum. We are creating young adults who can engage on important issues and take a position on any given topic. They can see it through different perspectives or lenses and TOK is one of the many ways the IB curriculum allows us to get closer to creating a citizen of the world.
Check out this short video for a brief explanation of TOK: