Writing the Exhibition

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The TOK exhibition is an essential component (worth 33% of final grade) of the IB TOK course, providing students with an opportunity to connect abstract knowledge questions with 3 tangible, real-world objects. Showcasing your exhibition to your teachers and peers is not part of the official grading. This guide covers everything from understanding the purpose of the exhibition to exemplar writings, ensuring a high-quality submission.

Purpose: To explore how TOK concepts manifest in the real world by analyzing three specific objects in relation to a prescribed IA prompt.

Scope: The exhibition is not a personal opinion piece; it’s a critical reflection on how knowledge is produced, shared, and applied in everyday contexts, using tangible objects as evidence.

Word Count Limit: 950

Assessment Criteria

Does the exhibition successfully show how TOK manifests in the world around us?

Selecting the right IA prompt is critical for crafting a compelling ToK Exhibition. The prompt serves as the foundation for your exploration of real-world objects and their connection to ToK Concepts.

Understand the Purpose of the Prompt

The prompt serves as the foundation of your exhibition. It frames your analysis of knowledge concepts and how they relate to real-world objects.

Each prompt is an open-ended question that allows you to explore knowledge questions. Your goal is to create a clear, thoughtful, and personalized response through objects.

Identify Your Strengths and Interests

Your personal interest will make the process more engaging and meaningful.

Think about your strengths, preferred Areas of Knowledge (AOKs), and objects that fascinate you.

2.2 Selecting the Best IA Prompt

Selecting effective and strong objects is essential for a high scoring exhibition. Your objects should not only be personally relevant and interesting to explore your chosen prompt but also allow for meaningful connections to ToK concepts.

Since demonstrating personal connections with your chosen objects is crucial for the exhibition, using ideas for objects from AI sources is not recommended (since it will not know what objects you own). However, using them as idea starters to help you find objects that convey a similar idea is okay.

Checklist for Individual Objects:

Is your object tangible and specific?

Objects must be real, not hypothetical or abstract.

Objects should have a clear story or background that connects to the prompt.

Does your object align with the prompt?

2.3 Choosing Effective Objects

The TOK exhibition is centered around one IA prompt, explored through three specific objects that exemplify the chosen prompt. Each object requires a written commentary of approximately 315 words, where students explain how the object connects to the prompt and illustrates key TOK concepts. The exhibition does not require an overall introduction or conclusion. Instead, the focus is on clear, concise analysis of each object in isolation, while maintaining a consistent connection to the chosen prompt throughout.

a. Background

Introduce the object and identify its specific real-world context.

What is it? Where is it from?

Explain your personal connection with the object.

Keep the paragraph shorter than 100 words.

2.4 Structuring the Exhibition

Essay

“What challenges are raised by the dissemination and/or communication of knowledge?”

The TOK prompt I have selected is: “What challenges are raised by the dissemination and/or communication of knowledge?”. This exhibition explores this prompt by reflecting on knowledge and language, and more specifically on whether subtext and connotation always create confusion rather than help us to communicate knowledge. The language we use in our everyday lives can often be interpreted many different ways by different people, depending on their cultural background, beliefs, ideologies, affiliations, personal experiences etc. In particular it seems that subtext and connotation can be particularly challenging as they are often only recognised by people that share some particular knowledge or experiences, and it seems that they can easily be interpreted very differently by different people which can cause confusion and hinder communication of knowledge.

Object 1. Starbucks holiday cup

This cup was used by Starbucks in 2017 and was controversial because some people viewed the symbol of the two hands holding hands on the cup as a sign that Starbucks was promoting a homosexual agenda, because they saw the cups as having an LGBT subtext. However, many other people just saw the cup as spreading joy and love during the holiday season and did not think that there was any particular subtext at all.

This cup is particularly interesting for this exhibition because a Starbucks spokesman said that they had intentionally designed the cup so that customers could interpret it in their own way, which suggests that they were deliberately trying to communicate in an open or vague way rather than seeing the disagreement this might cause as being negative/ a challenge. In this way, the cup highlights how confusion arising from the use of subtext can be useful or can actually even be used by people intentionally to provoke discussion. The cup generated a lot of media attention for the company while still allowing them to say that how the cup was to be interpreted was up to their individual customers to decide.

Essay

“Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?”

Object 1: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a novel that was published in 1958. It tells the story of the Igbo people (a Nigerian tribe) and their deeply rooted cultural and religious practices. Achebe infuses his writing with cultural references and literary devices (such as “Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan”) that show how the Igbo people understand their world. Their economy is based on agriculture, so they have specific words like “harmattan” which represents the dry and dusty season. This knowledge may seem strange and foreign to me, but this is crucial knowledge for the Igbo people to have because if they plant their yams during this season they will not survive. Achebe was born in an Igbo town and is part of this community of knowers, so he understands the Igbo people and shares their knowledge.

As a white girl from an affluent town, I read about other cultures and through studying them in school, I respect and appreciate them. However, I also must acknowledge that I will never be able to fully understand them, as I was not born into this culture and I don’t think that anyone outside of a culture or community can truly know things in the same way as someone inside it. People see the world through the paradigms that are created through their personal experiences, so culture is a lens that every person sees the world through.