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ENDING TOK:
LAST TOK CLASSES

Ending a TOK course with ritual aplomb is just as important as a good beginning. Why not try something like this?

• Reframe the core theme—Knowledge and the Knower

• Facilitate one last in-depth class discussion on Post-truth

• Ask students to complete a college-style, anonymous feedback survey

• Revisit a few lines of Walt Whitman

• Declare “this is where the story stops this ti…”
  

 ME AS A KNOWER AND A THINKER

Here are the essential questions from the core theme graphic in the TOK Subject Guide:

1. How do I distinguish between claims that are contestable and claims that are not?

2. What resources do I have as a knower to help me navigate the world?

3. Where do my values come from?

4. What shapes my perspective as a knower?

5. How am I influenced by the different communities of knowers I belong to?

POST-TRUTH QUESTIONS

To invite some focused, end-game discussion here are the generative questions from the Post-truth? unit in the knowledge and politics optional theme.

1. Are we really living in a post-truth world or have we always been surrounded by obfuscations and lies disguised as facts?

2. Have we reached a tipping point in our digital age where the sheer volume of advertising, distraction and outright deception have created a new chapter for humanity worthy of the name “post-truth”?

3. Has “post-truth” muddied the waters? Have the consequences of fake news, social media bubbles, partisan echo chambers and the like, made it more difficult for TOK students to discern the difference between good and bad interpretations and to avoid the pitfalls of outright relativism?

4. In a populist, post-truth era has it become harder for IB students to embrace the value of multiple perspectives and to maintain an international mindset?

FINAL THOUGHTS…

Students are bigger than any program, even a really good one like the IB Diploma!

Deep learning requires a kind of safe stress. Nobody ever “changed their mind” without some discomfort. The spirit of TOK is all about asking questions and daring to know. It is subversive in the sense that it discourages swallowing piecemeal conventional ideas of the day or the prepackaged opinions of peers or authority figures. It doesn’t matter how smart you thought you might have been compared to others in the room What mattered was your own participation in the questioning and the discussions and the gradual deepening your own understandings.

The TOK spirit is empowering. It is the opposite of allowing yourself to be pushed around by external forces. It is revenge for feeling intimidated or bewildered by knowledge and ideas that always seem to be owned by somebody else. No work of art, literature or music, scientific announcement, historic controversy, mathematical argument, esoteric vocabulary, ethical conundrum or political complexity should forever off limits.

When the dust clears on the particularities of playing the TOK game, what will count are a deeply rooted capacity for critical thought, reduced vulnerability for being manipulated, and the confidence to act―to be a player in the real world and actually make some kind of difference!