KNOWER(S) AND KNOWLEDGE ISSUES
TOK students are knowers—in medias res―already in the thick of the action. The TOK Subject Guide is quite explicit about this:
TOK students typically have 16 years of life experience and more than 10 years of formal education behind them. They have accumulated a vast amount of knowledge, beliefs and opinions from academic disciplines and their lives outside the classroom. In TOK they have the opportunity to step back from this relentless acquisition of new knowledge, in order to consider knowledge issues.
TOK teaching is nothing if not generative. Knowledge acquisition, both as individual quest and as dynamic social activity, are strongly emphasized. The Subject Guide states that students are encouraged:
to discover and express their views... [and] ...to share ideas with others and to listen to and learn from what others think. In this process students’ thinking and their understanding of knowledge as a human construction are shaped, enriched and deepened.
CLASSROOM SET-PIECE ACTIVITIES AND RESOURCES
WHAT IS TOK?
Introductions and common agreements for discussion
Whitman and Wallace Stevens poems evoking TOK
The official TOK diagram and Assessment Outline
Explore mystery objects by touch alone
Student knowledge claims
READY... FIRE, AIM!
Hitler watercolor
Euler relation
Trotsky airbrushed
Adelson illusion
This statement is false
Watson and Crick’s DNA model
Shakespeare's Cleopatra
Chess algorithm
Milgram's willing executioners
Monty Python’s Argument sketch
EMBODIED KNOWER(S)―“MANAS THE MEASURE”
Why do octopi know so very little?
Figs―viewed from multiple perspectives I
Figs―viewed from multiple perspectives II
What do Kindergarteners know?
Feral children and forbidden experiments
Overnight Retreat
Objective and subjective―a figure drawing workshop
Knowledge and direct experience
Critique of justified true belief
Truth and certainty: analytical and synthetic knowledge
Allegory of the Cave: Truman Show
Knowledge issues