Theory of knowledge (TOK) is a unique study of the IB Diploma Programme which aims to explore and initiate the thinking process in the IB students. It comes under the IB Diploma Programme’s core elements. TOK makes you aware of the manner knowledge is interpreted: in a sense it opens up a wide window for students to explore how to know what they know. You, as the TOK students, get to reflect on the knowledge you have acquired all this while. Of course, when you question yourself ‘what is knowledge’, you get to inspect information. The inspection helps you evaluate whether biases are retained, revised, or rejected in the process of constructing knowledge.
Theory of Knowledge gives you an opportunity to explore the nature of knowledge and the process of constructing the knowledge. You will mull over thoughts on beliefs, opinions, knowledge you have gathered over the years as social beings. As you walk through the Theory of Knowledge coursework, you would explore open ended generic knowledge questions, which are contestable. The TOK course in the IB Diploma Programme helps in creating an atmosphere of curiosity, where teaching and learning becomes an interesting activity.
Theory of Knowledge (TOK) consists of three interconnected parts.
The Core theme -The knowledge and the knower: The core theme of TOK is all about how knowers reflect themselves in belonging to a community of knowers.
The Optional Themes: The optional themes of TOK, two chosen for study from a choice of five, shows the nexus between knowledge and technology, language, politics, religion, and indigenous societies. True that the optional themes have real life relevance in shaping up identities and perspectives. The five optional themes are:
- Knowledge and Technology
- Knowledge and Language
- Knowledge and Politics
- Knowledge and Religion
- Knowledge and Indigenous societies
Areas of Knowledge: AOKs are distinctive branches of knowledge which are compulsorily attempted by the students to gain knowledge. They are history, the arts, human sciences, natural sciences and mathematics.
The knowledge questions are organized in knowledge framework, which consists of four components- Scope, Perspective, Methods and Tools and Ethics. The knowledge framework explores each of the areas of knowledge. Through the knowledge framework each area of knowledge is well explained as a system of five interacting elements. These frameworks help the students to find an in-depth meaning on various factors.
There are 12 TOK concepts: evidence, certainty, truth, interpretation, power, justification, explanation, objectivity, perspective, culture, values and responsibility. The TOK concepts give you a deeper insight into knowledge
Theory of Knowledge is assessed in a unique way. It is evaluated by conducting a TOK Exhibition and The TOK Essay. TOK 2022 is the new TOK curriculum. TOK 2022 has the externally assessed task, the TOK essay worth of 67% and the internally assessed new task, the TOK exhibition worth of 33% of the grades.
TOK exhibition is an independent individual task of 10 marks. How TOK manifests in the real world has to be brought through the specific real-life objects of personal importance with an IA prompt within one of the TOK themes.
The TOK Essay is a 1600 word essay which connects to title which is relevant to the areas of knowledge. It is an external assessment which will examined by the IB examiners. The titles are given out by the IB. Students are supposed to choose one among the six titles provided.
The TOK Course Outline
Course Elements | Minimum Teaching hours |
Core Theme: Knowledge and the Knower | 32 |
Optional Themes Students are asked to choose two optional themes out of the five:
| |
Areas Of Knowledge
| 50 |
Assessment Students are required to complete two assessment tasks:
|
18 |
Total Minimum Teaching Hours | 100 |
Let us zoom into the different interconnected parts of TOK.
Core Theme
The Knowledge and the Knower
The TOK core theme revolves around the person who is in the pursuit of knowing. While exploring knowledge, the knowers would find cogent and authentic evidences to claim an information as knowledge. Questions may arise that ‘what forms as the premise to claim an information as knowledge’? Every person has his or her own perspective in claiming knowledge.
The TOK journey gives you the provision to be open minded enough in evaluating the contestability of knowledge claims, without just framing an information as knowledge. Knowledge claims are supposed to be open, generic, and contestable. What is true for you might not be true for me. However, knowers should also inspect the influence of bias in knowledge.
Optional Themes
According to the IB’s syllabus for Diploma Programme, the teacher chooses two out of five optional themes. Optional themes are:
- Knowledge and technology
- Knowledge and language
- Knowledge and religion
- Knowledge and politics
- Knowledge and indigenous societies.
The IB diploma Programme has chosen the TOK optional themes effectively due to its sturdy relevance to the real-world scenarios.
Knowledge and technology
Technology has made our life easier. With the influx of internet, we have information all around us. Search engines like Google provides information on almost everything in just a click and within a split second we have truck-loads of information in front of us.
The TOK theme discusses on how the effect of technology has impacted our ways of acquiring knowledge. This also paves the way to go deep into different arenas of how knowledge has infused with technology and made a difference to the lives of everyone living around the planet.
Let me take an example of a recent movie I had seen, “HER”, starring Joaquin Phoenix, which tells us about how his life is taken over by a recently launched operating system which has a female voice assistant. The influence of technology over us is far more complicated than we expect them to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJTU48_yghs
The kind of leverage social media has in this age of information, is quite high. There are tons of manipulated and biased material which spans out into the society like a quick fire. These directly lead to disputes, religious or racist attacks over the internet and one can’t even definitely trace the source of news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Tq2gvGt80
So, in this technology induced era, one has to be very sure of the information that he or she shares amongst the crowd.
Knowledge and language
Communication is the key to sustenance. Without communication, catering to one’s needs is definitely a mishap bound to happen. Hence, in order to communicate effectively we need the means which is language. Language helps us in sharing the knowledge we possess and helps us in understanding more about other people.
Language holds the key to one’s cultural diversity. Through understanding language, it gives an individual the insight into their ethnicity and to realise how the growth of that particular community has come over the ages.
Let’s take look at a humorous take on how a UK born Indian tells the clash of his identity came up with different languages and cultural diversity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP0bAQ8J6C0
Written works in native languages holds imparts morals, standards and in-depth deliberation of ethical concepts. Native works construe a system that engage profoundness of cultural concepts and values.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubejua6vZfI
Knowledge and politics
Politics is a very dynamic area of interest. It is probably one among the major topics where there’s constant conflict of interests. Political unrest is a common scenario in developed and developing countries. These conflicts have great impact on the life of the common citizens. Political issues arise when there is bias or favoritism of certain group of people. This is something which is bound to happen as no one political has ever been able to cater or please all categories of people.
A recent example of a dire political situation right now is in South Africa. The former president Jacob Zuma was arrested and put down for a prison term of 15-month for contempt of court and corruption charges. The aftermath of such situations crumbles the economy of the country and eventually let the poor people suffer indefinitely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JevGPfr7TvE
Various discussions, newspaper articles, debates, speeches etc. gives us the knowledge of the political stature prevalent in a country. But deriving knowledge out of this can be a blunder as almost all media houses are biased one- or the-party politics and hence give their own biased versions. To acquire unbiased knowledge, we have to keep track on news which comes in 360 degrees.
Knowledge and religion
Religion is something which is indulged in and by us from our birth. We practice religion to an extent because we have been trained to do so. Religion has the ability to define a person’s lifestyle, thinking process, behaviour, culture and even the way he or she perceives things. It has also a great influence on our rational thinking capacity. We tend to be biased and irrational when it comes to religion and this in turn affects the perception of the individuals.
Now, we can see how people are diverting from the idea of religion as the times are changing. When people demand for more rational explanations and when science has a way of supporting the statements, people start moving away from religious understatements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paVXPXoyDdo
Knowledge and Indigenous societies
Indigenous societies are those communities of people who are a definite minority and have faced different kind of discrimination over the different phases of time. The optional theme helps us to look into the roots of these indigenous society and analyse their culture, system, their functionalities. This aids in reviewing the subject matter from their point of view or perspective.
The LGBTQ community all over the world are fighting for their acceptance as normal human beings. When someone comes out their closet, they are immediately criticized and are taken out for heinous conversion “therapies”. Here we have Jenni Chang and Liza Dazols experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivfJJh9y1UI
Areas of Knowledge
- History
To learn and understand the past requires inquiry and this inquiry led to the subject History. Speaking of certainty of the past, is a still an ambiguity. We can never stress on the effectiveness of the past because it is something we have zero awareness in. We find knowledge about the gone years through relevant articles, artifacts, broken civilizations and so on. Studying history brings about analyzing the events of the past and acknowledging the diversity of the bygone years.
History is always up for questioning. Even with proper documental evidencing of an event in the past, we are still able to raise questions and represent a different point of view. Hence, history as an area of knowledge initiates lots of inquiry which is essence of IB’s approach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqc9zX04DXs
- Natural Science
Natural science relates with evidential learning. Science is hailed as the holy grail as because it always has reasoning to support their findings. The factors that distinguish natural science from non-science and pseudo-science, are the methods that are chosen to prove a point. Scientific experiments are always funded by big corporates, which can lead to biased outcomes if not kept under close watch.
In an eye-opening talk, meteorologist J. Marshall Shepherd explains how confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect and cognitive dissonance impact what we think we know — and shares ideas for how we can replace them with something much more powerful: knowledge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcNvkhS4UYg
- Human Science
Human science is a cognitive subject. It studies about the human behaviour; hence it doesn’t have fixed answer to all its theories. Human behaviour must be the most volatile act that you can see on the face of earth. Prediction of human character or their reaction to problem or situations can never be done with full satisfaction. Human Science is divided into different heads as such. They are psychology, social and cultural anthropology, economics, political science, and geography.
- The Arts
Art is the subject of perception. Any form of art conveys different ideas to different people. People can even come up with viewpoints which maybe even beyond the idea of the artist. It can include visual arts, theatre, dance, music, film and literature. Arts can deliver us to a time where the conditions and culture were completely different. It can also bring about heated discussions just on the basis how heavily we interpret the. Lots of knowledge can be obtained through analyzing and understanding art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN820hIQ17Q
- Mathematics
The subject always intrigues a certain amount of complexity and certainty in the human minds. Mathematics is considered to be subject which provides with an answer which is always exact. But, have we ever thought about finding a different perspective by making the mathematic constraints or methods a little bit lenient and what we could find by inducing a little bit of creativity, imagination and beauty to arrive at conclusions? This is an excellent area for TOK to explore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6yixyiJcos
TOK assessment
TOK exhibition
TOK exhibition is an individual assessment component. TOK essay is internally assessed and externally moderated by IB assessment. The theme of the exhibition is either focused on the core theme or the optional themes
- You have to intuitively choose 3 distinct, specific, concrete, perceptible real-life objects.
- You are to select one out of the 35 prescribed TOK ‘IA prompts’, which are generic and abstract knowledge questions.
- You have a commentary to write in 950 words explaining how the abstract and generic TOK concepts manifest in the real-world.
TOK essay
The TOK essay has to be written on the prescribed title given out by IB. The IB releases six sets of prescribed titles for each examination session. 10 teaching hours are to be dedicated for working on the essay. The maximum length of the essay should be not more than 1600 words. It should be an original work done by individual student. Teachers can guide them through the process and make them understand the whole process.
The nature of TOK as an IB Diploma Programme core subject is to help students reflect on knowledge and the process of knowing. More than a stand-alone subject, TOK unites all the selected subjects out of the IB courses. TOK helps you to intricately look into and reflect on the knowledge you construct as a knower in the various areas of knowledge and also life beyond the classroom. In a nutshell, the study of TOK makes you an open minded and rational explorer.
