{"id":3814,"date":"2016-05-22T20:05:22","date_gmt":"2016-05-22T17:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/?p=3814"},"modified":"2016-05-22T20:05:22","modified_gmt":"2016-05-22T17:05:22","slug":"theory-of-knowledge-in-history-the-challenge-of-source-material","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/key-stage\/ib-history\/theory-of-knowledge-in-history-the-challenge-of-source-material\/","title":{"rendered":"Theory of Knowledge in History: The Challenge of Source Material"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/historiography\/tok\/calvin.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"377\" \/>Session 1: Sources<\/h1>\n<p>[<a href=\"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/historiography\/tok\/2016\/1_Evidence.doc\">student worksheet<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/historiography\/tok\/2016\/teacher\/1_Evidence.doc\">teacher notes<\/a>]<\/p>\n<h2>Introduction: Why and How is History Produced?<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;History&#8221; is not &#8220;What happened in the past&#8221; or even &#8220;The surviving evidence of what happened in the past&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>It means &#8220;What historians choose to interpret from the surviving evidence of the past&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>To reduce this to a formula, we might say:<\/li>\n<li><strong>Sources + Historians = Histories<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>So it is important to consider what the nature of the surviving evidence is, and how historians then choose to select and present it.<\/li>\n<li>In these three TOK sessions, I therefore investigate three ways in which we gain a &#8220;knowledge&#8221; of History:\n<ul>\n<li>Session 1. The Sources: What are the limitations of the surviving evidence?<\/li>\n<li>Session 2. The Historians: What are the limitations of the historians using that evidence?<\/li>\n<li>Session 3. The Histories: What, therefore, are the limitations of the histories produced?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>The Historians and their Sources<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>The first way in which we gain knowledge of the past is through historical evidence (&#8220;sources&#8221;). Two questions raise themselves:\n<ul>\n<li>How can we extract knowledge from the sources? (issues of quality and quantity)<\/li>\n<li>How useful is the knowledge that we extract in this way? (issues of comprehensibility and the &#8216;language gap&#8217;)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Session 1: Sources [student worksheet\u00a0|\u00a0teacher notes] Introduction: Why and How is History Produced? &#8220;History&#8221; is not &#8220;What happened in the past&#8221; or even &#8220;The surviving evidence of what happened in the past&#8221;. It means &#8220;What historians choose to interpret from the surviving evidence of the past&#8221; To reduce this to a formula, we might say:&#8230; <\/p>\n<div class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/key-stage\/ib-history\/theory-of-knowledge-in-history-the-challenge-of-source-material\/\">Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pAq0G-Zw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3814"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3814"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3815,"href":"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3814\/revisions\/3815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.activehistory.co.uk\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}