TOK Exhibition

 Where does our knowledge come from? Does it have bias? What does knowledge have to do with morals? We, the students of IB25 delved into these thought-provoking questions and many more in our TOK exhibition, held on June 6th, 2024. Our exhibition aimed to intrigue many of our school, possibly even you reading this. And if you didn’t happen to make it in person, you may be intrigued after reading this article.

TOK and the exhibition: What are they exactly?

As part of the core of the programme, all of us IB students undertake the Theory of Knowledge (TOK) course, one that those unfamiliar with the IB might be new to the concept of. TOK doesn’t just broaden our ways of thinking, it revamps our intrinsic abilities of interpretation as a whole. We learn to challenge how we view the world around us and how the deeper meaning of knowledge ties into everything we believe in. In our journey, we are challenged with creating an exhibition to answer prompts given to us. These relate to knowledge that we select, choosing three objects present in our daily lives to relate and reinforce our interpretations altogether. To share our work with the rest of the school, a profound TOK exhibition comes to life.

Our Exhibition:

“You exit class, presented with an arrow leading down the hall. It has the colours of a crime scene, and you choose to investigate. As you follow the arrows, you’re at the Aula, which has been completely taken over. It’s a crime scene now. What’s the crime? Non critical thinkers. You step into the Aula and are greeted with a maze guiding you through questions you only dreamed of answering before. As you walk through, you gain knowledge at each stand. This is what you were missing, this is what satiates your subconscious.”

Our goal with the exhibition was to guide students and all interested into the world of critical thinking. Many students came uninterested, but left with a residual feeling of awe even prioritising participating in it over their participation in class, as they were caught in the web of thinking that we had created for them. The maze was different from any other exhibition held in our school, and helped give a structure to something that trains methodical approaches.

Overall, the TOK exhibition was an absolute blast for us. The great organisation by the exhibition committee, the expertise of Mr. Krause and the epic music track by Mr.T facilitated many insightful and interesting conversations during the day. While the day left us with sore throats it also gave us many new interesting questions from the visitors to explore. We hope every visitor had as much fun as we did looking at 20(!) different exhibitions as we had explaining our work in what was, according to Mr.T, the “best exhibition to date. ”

Special thanks to Mr. T, Mr. Krause, Joy Johnsen, Lisa-Paule Nkuna, Peter Parker, Punnawish Wirawattantana and every visitor who contributed making it as enlightening as it was.

Rumo Schilling, Hamza Muhammad, Peter Parker, Leyre Garcia Martin