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Overview
The following materials have been designed to help deliver Theory of Knowledge (TOK) in History at IB (International Baccalaureate) Level to my students at the International School of Toulouse.
I deliver three sessions of one hour each, and round the unit off by setting a relevant TOK essay title from the IB syllabus (these are provided annually in advance).
As well as the worksheets and teacher notes available for download here, there is also a series of online lecture notes which can be used.
Session 1: Sources
Introduction: Why and How is History Produced?
- "History" is not "What happened in the past" or even "The surviving evidence of what happened in the past".
- It means "What historians choose to interpret from the surviving evidence of the past"
- To reduce this to a formula, we might say:
- Sources + Historians = Histories
- So it is important to consider what the nature of the surviving evidence is, and how historians then choose to select and present it.
- In these three TOK sessions, I therefore investigate three ways in which we gain a "knowledge" of History:
- Session 1. The Sources: What are the limitations of the surviving evidence?
- Session 2. The Historians: What are the limitations of the historians using that evidence?
- Session 3. The Histories: What, therefore, are the limitations of the histories produced?
Video Clip 1: "Conditions in WW2" |
Video Clip 2: "The Size of the Universe" |
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[Student worksheet | Teacher notes]
The Historians and their Sources
- The first way in which we gain knowledge of the past is through historical evidence ("sources"). Two questions raise themselves:
- How can we extract knowledge from the sources? (issues of quality and quantity)
- How useful is the knowledge that we extract in this way? (issues of comprehensibility and the 'language gap')
Video Clip 1: "The Bayeux Tapestry" |
Video Clip 2: "The Great Train Robbery" |
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[Student worksheet | Extension Task | Teacher notes]
Session 2: Historians
- Sources are incomplete, untypical and unreliable, as we found out in our last session. Historians therefore need to:
- Select sources to use, based on what questions need answering;
- Interpret those sources and make deductions from them;
- Organise and present their main conclusions to the public.
- Arguably, this process of selection and interpretation distorts our "knowledge" even further. All historians have their own views and interests, formed by upbringing, social background, and current affairs; this will determine the questions they choose to investigate, the sources they choose answer those questions, the interpretation which they put on those sources and even the words they use (“one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”).
- In this session, we will therefore investigate the different approaches of historians to the way they choose to "package" the past. We will do this by looking at three main approaches:
- To inform
- To persuade
- To entertain
Video Clip 1: "Henry VIII - Ray Winstone" |
Video Clip 2: "Matchstick Wars" |
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Video Clip 3: "World at War: Demonisation of Hitler" |
Video Clip 4: "The Eternal Jew" |
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[Student worksheet | Teacher notes]
Session 3: Histories
- It has been said that "all history is contemporary history" (Croce) and “History tells us more about the person who wrote it than about the people being written about” (Carr).
- In this sense, works of history themselves become sources for later generations of historians!
- In this session, we will look at the three broad interpretations about the course of history that historians have formulated.
- Whig School
- Marxist School
- Annales School
Video Clip 1: "AJP Taylor" |
Video Clip 2: "Mark Steel" |
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[Student worksheet | Teacher notes]
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