February 11, 2003

What do you know?

How do you know it?

The Theory of Knowledge course puts the learners at the centre and engages them in critical thinking not only about what they are learning but also how they come to know it. This graphical representation is helpful in understanding how the course works. Read on for more explanation and examples.

The Theory of Knowledge is often considered the flagship course of the IB diploma programme – and for good reason

Story and pictures by TERRY FREDRICKSON
Secondary education may be changing, but most courses are still comfortably familiar. Mathematics courses, for example, still cover discrete topics like algebra, geometry, calculus. History courses remain largely fact-based although progressive schools do spend significant time evaluating sources and recognising bias.

Schedules, too, remain as tight as ever and teachers of university-bound students often struggle to cover the syllabus by exam time. Thus, even if they wanted to, they would seldom have time to consider questions that might prompt their students to think about what they are learning in fresh, non-traditional ways.

For example, is mathematics actually found in the world around us or is it something we impose on the world? Is it really possible to know the past? Can we ever be certain about a historical "fact"? Interesting questions, to be sure, but not the type normally found in an already crowded syllabus.

There are exceptions, however. One of the most interesting is the Theory of Knowledge (TOK), a two-year 100-hour plus course that is a distinctive feature of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma programme so popular in the final two years at many of the top international schools in Thailand. Recently the learning post talked with two TOK coordinators to find out what this course is all about.

Thinking critically

Simon Thom

"At it’s simplest," says Simon Thom, TOK coordinator at the New International School of Thailand (NIST), "TOK encourages the asking of questions. ‘Why?’ ‘How do you know?’ It gets students to question their own assumptions, to think critically – in a sense to unlearn a lot of what they’ve learnt.

"It’s not to be confused with the branch of philosophy which is also called ‘theory of knowledge’ which is the nature of knowing. That comes into it, but it’s much broader," Thom explains.

Joni Makivirta

Joni Makivirta, course coordinator at Dulwich International College agrees. "I would say it’s sort of a crash course in critical thinking," he says. "It’s not philosophy.

"The idea in TOK," Makivirta continues, "is that students will be actively making sense of their own understanding. The course also tries to create interdisciplinary links between subjects so that a student who leaves the school is not just a specialist in the sciences or in history."

How we know

The accompanying diagram is particularly useful in understanding the basic concepts behind TOK.

"At the centre is the knower," Thom explains. "We start with how do we know what we know."

At NIST, Thom begins with emotions. "That’s a relatively new addition to the theory of knowledge," he observes. "Before, the idea of irrational, non-rational ways of knowing wasn’t accepted. We also look at reason – deductive and inductive – quite closely because it’s a very important tool," Thom continues.

Language is obviously essential to knowledge acquisition as well. Here, cautions Makivirta, it is important that students understand how language can be biased. "You might think that you understand every word I say or I understand every word you say, but the kind of words we choose colour the message," he points out.

Finally, there are our sense perceptions – "how most of us know things and trust what we know," Thom says.

Once again students are taught to think critically and to be aware of how our senses can be imperfect.

"There are lots of examples of illusions," Makivirta says. "We know they’re not true but if we rely on only one sense we can be misled.

"Like the duck-rabbit picture. When you look at it, you think ‘oh that’s a duck’. When you look at it again, it actually can look like a rabbit. It depends on how your mind interprets the perception."

In teaching this introductory section of the course, Makivirta, like most other TOK instructors, attempts to tie the concepts to the students’ own experience of the world.

"In what sort of situations have their emotional states either hindered or helped them to know something? I might give them some examples of biased language and ask what they think about it? How does it make them feel? Why do they think that way?"

Current events are another obvious source of material for discussion," says Thom. "We try to ground TOK in what’s really going on. Let’s say the buildup to a possible war right now, for example, and the rhetoric that’s being used – the overt motivations, the possible covert motivations, the claims, the counterclaims. We look at things with a fairly critical eye.

"We can also relate the course to our host culture," Thom continues, "like the trashing of the market on Soi 10 (Sukhumvit) the other night. The cause of that may not be one single simple thing. It’s a whole complex series of things. What are they? Economic? Political? Personal?"

What we know

The way the TOK is taught can vary widely from school to school. This is particularly true in the second phase of the course where the focus changes from how we know to what we know.

In this phase of the course, the students consider six "Areas of Knowledge" including mathematics, natural sciences, human sciences, history, the arts and ethics. They look at the ways of knowing unique to each discipline, but also look for linkages so that knowledge does not become compartmentalised.

This section can be taught by a single TOK instructor, but neither Makivirta nor Thom recommend that. At Dulwich, specialist teachers teach the various areas of knowledge. Thus a mathematician would teach the maths section.

But, Makivirta says, the teacher would not be teaching maths per se. "It’s not the maths lesson. It’s how mathematicians think – the process involved in the discovery of irrational numbers, for example"

Similarly, "a scientist might introduce theories about how scientific discoveries are made, perhaps discussing Popper and explaining his idea of falsifications and how you never actually prove a theory, you just don’t falsify it – the metathinking that goes into doing science."

Makivirta particularly enjoys this approach to TOK. "The good thing about this is that it makes teachers talk to each other," he says. And I get excited when I’m listening to somebody saying something about maths. You get out of your own classroom. It’s great. It’s like going back to school."

With a larger and more diverse TOK staff, Thom and his NIST colleagues can handle much of the content by themselves. "We’re lucky in our department to have a scientist, three human scientists with different specialities and an IT and music person, so we’ve got a broad spectrum of expertise," he says.

But the TOK team also regularly brings in colleagues from outside the department. "When we come to aesthetics, for instance, of course we’ll bring in an art teacher to talk about how to read a painting," Thom explains. "And it would be folly not to exploit the wealth of expertise that is in this school. There are people who, outside of their own subject area, are passionate about this or that. We bring them in," Thom explains.

Taking a stand

TOK is not your standard lecture course. The students are active participants. Essays and student presentations are frequent and students may even lead discussions. The course culminates in the second year with a formal internally-graded presentation and a 1200-1600-word essay on a prescribed topic which is sent to the IB organisation for marking.

This year’s graduating class has a choice of ten topics including such weighty questions as "Is it a simple matter to distinguish a scientific argument from a pseudo-scientific argument?" or "We are more likely to be mistaken in our generalisations than in our particular observations. Do you agree?"

Throughout the course, students learn to question what they know. "They realise that most things they know are somehow a little bit biased, a little bit coloured," Makivirta observes. "They should be critical about that and not just think that they’re obviously right. They should have a little doubt in the back of their minds."

Both Makivirta and Thom are acutely aware that this doubt can be taken too far and they try to avoid having their students lapse into relativism, the concept that everything is open to doubt.

"It’s too easy to fall into ‘it could be this, it could be that, I don’t know’", says Thom. "That’s not what we’re going for. We are looking for awareness of different perspectives, but in the long run making a stand."

Thom recounts a particularly effective session which brought this point home to his students. "Last year a historian brought in a revisionist version of the holocaust (i.e., that the systematic killing of Jews during World War II never happened) and presented it as fact. He then asked the students what they thought? The students said ‘but, but, but’ and they found the sources to contradict his position. ‘All of these witnesses can’t have been wrong.’ they argued.

"The teacher in question then made the point that ‘yes, there comes a certain point where you don’t just say well it can be this, it can be that. You make a stand and say this happened. We are sure enough that this happened.’"

The place of TOK

The TOK is one of the reasons the IB diploma has become well accepted among university admissions officers. But what will it do for students when they finish their education? Take a 25-year old in the business world, for example.

"It should give them a greater range of considerations and help them be aware of different perspectives," Makivirta suggests. "Even people who say things I would totally disagree with, they might have their reasons and I would try to – or at least attempt to put myself in their shoes and look at it from their perspective.

"Hopefully, it will help to see the point of view of the customer if nothing else. There might also be ethical considerations that you might want to think about when you’re running a business.

"Are you just thinking of material profit or are you thinking about moral profit? It’s that kind of idea — that hopefully a person would just stop and think."

Stop and think – the essence of TOK.

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