What is the ToK Mindset? and how do we create it?
It's a warm Thursday afternoon, the last period of the day, and you have DP1 ToK in a warm and stuffy classroom. Attention is wandering, some students are drifting between drowsiness and distraction. You're trying your best, they're trying their best. However, three students, sitting near the front have steel like attention fixed on the task at hand. They're engrossed in lively conversation about the difference between perceived knowledge and evidential knowledge, they keep calling you over for clarification. They want you to explain some of the finer points of Kantian Transcendental Realism even though they know it's far beyond the demands of this course. These students have developed the ToK Mindset (and some!).
The challenge for the ToK Teacher is to help all students to develop the ToK Mindset. OK, we don't need all of our students to go as far as the 3 Neo-Kantians ! Our challenge is to get our students to a point where they can apply a rather abstract framework and set of principles to the lived world.
This is the third Blog post in this series, the first concerned Knowledge Issues, and the second is a lesson starter activity that you can use to link ToK Concepts with Knowledge Issues. Both previous posts will help to build background understanding for this post.
What is the ToK Mindset?
The ToK Mindset is the ability to apply the ToK Framework, and principles of ToK, to the world that we experience.
an experienced ToK Teacher.
How do we create the ToK Mindset?
4 areas of understanding need to create the ToK Mindset.
We can try to identify what it is that those students who understand ToK have that the other students have less of. I think that there are 4 areas of understanding:
Making the familiar unfamiliar means questioning taken for granted assumptions. Simon Sinek coined the phrase "asking why not what", and we can repurpose that for ToK. This is why I teach my students that the first rule of ToK is to "Question the question".
Three key concepts: Perspective, Context and Extrapolation, allow the students to understand their their lived reality is not a standardised and universal experience. These concepts allow them to build conceptual and abstract models. These are the thinking skills which enable students to understand that "other's with their differences may also be right".
The BLURS mnemonic helps students to develop arguments that are nuanced, and have the combination of complexity, depth and analysis required in ToK.
An understanding that knowledge is constructed. This seems self evident, but it is more complicated than it seems. Students can often say that knowledge is constructed without necessarily appreciating what that means. I come across this most frequently when we're looking at AoK History or Maths. In both AoKs students will refer to "the truth", or "what actually happened". When I remind them that "knowledge is constructed" they often don't see the inherent contradiction.
Conclusion.
If we can build understanding in the 4 areas for the ToK Mindset we will improve understanding, and grades, in ToK. The challenge is how we build that understanding. In the next blog post in this series I will look at the underlying framework for teaching which helps to build that understanding. It may also be useful to look at the ToK Skills Map (I welcome any feedback / suggestions on the Skills Map).
Daniel,
Lisbon, August 2022.