Theory of Knowledge

Creating your TOK Presentation

Hello Everyone!

A few weeks ago, we wrapped our presentations for TOK. Since there were only 4 people in our TOK class, we split up into groups of two. Towards the brainstorming phase of our presentation, my partner and I were very confused on how to approach our presentation and how to get started. So, this blog post will focus on how the steps we took to complete our TOK presentation. There is by no means a specific way of approaching a TOK presentation - I just hope this post will give you some inspiration!

1. Find a Real Life Situation you are PASSIONATE about.

You will be spending countless hours researching this topic, so you have to be interested in what you're doing. My partner and I found an article published in the Huffington Post that outlined the case of Michelle Carter - a teenage girl who encouraged her then-boyfriend into committing suicide through a series of text messages. We had no idea why someone would want to harm anyone in this way, so we decided to investigate it!

Also, a hearty Real Life Situation often leads to a great Knowledge Question. For example, your neighbor's dog giving birth isn't exactly a good foundation for your presentation, unless there was something seriously controversial about it.

2. Discuss your Real Life Situation and pinpoint key elements that you would like to include in your presentation. For example, see if your Real Life Situation can relate back to a TOK Way of Knowing or Area of Knowledge. 

One of my mistakes was that my partner and I tried to brainstorm a Knowledge Question before we knew what we were dealing with. After taking a step back and discussing what questions arose from our Real Life Situation, we started to come up with ideas. Referring back to our Real Life Situation with Michelle Carter, we discussed the following: we wondered whether Michelle's action were carefully orchestrated as a result of her intense emotions, pure reason, or a combination of the two. We recognized that emotion and reason were two of the Ways of Knowing (WOK) in TOK. However, after referencing research conducted by Antonio Damasio on a brain-injury patient, we found that the two WOKs cannot be separated in a healthy human brain. Without evidence of Carter’s possible psychological imbalance, we can conclude that she, like all of us, used some combination of emotion and reason in her decision to harm her boyfriend. From this, we wanted to further explore the relationship between emotion and reason and decided to question the extent to which emotion helped or hindered the reasoning process.

3. Finalize the key elements you would like to include in your presentation and isolate a few Ways of Knowing or Areas of Knowledge that you would like to explore. Then, outline a Knowledge Question!

In Step 2, we found that we wanted to focus on emotion and reason in our presentation. Our main idea was to research whether emotions helped or hindered the reasoning process. From there, we developed the following Knowledge Question that served as the basis for our presentation: "Are emotions an enemy of, or necessary for, good reasoning?"

4. Begin researching specific TOK-related examples/claims that link to your Knowledge Question and organize them in a coherent manner.

Of course, your Knowledge Question shouldn't have a straight forward answer. You should explore every aspect of your question that you find is relevant. This is the time when you should dig into your TOK notes from class and see if you can find any theories, claims, or examples that will help answer your Knowledge Question. For my presentation, we found 3 claims that were extremely relatable to our Knowledge Question. Under each claim, we found evidence to both prove and disprove it to make sure that we eliminated any bias. For example, one of our claims was the following: "Emotions serve as automatic biasing mechanisms that have positive effects on the reasoning process".  The example we used for this claim was the 'Deck of Cards' experiment conducted by the University of Iowa. In this experiment, test  subjects were asked to pick cards randomly from 4 decks. 2 decks contained safe outcomes, whereas 2 decks contained risky outcomes. After pulling 10 cards from random decks, the subjects experienced intuitive/emotional responses (sweaty palms, faster heart rate, distress, fear) but were not consciously aware of them. After 70 cards, the subjects were able to logically identify their intuitive/emotional response and they associated them with the riskier decks.

5. After organizing your examples/claims, create your PowerPoint!

Your PowerPoint should never be a collection of slides with tons of information on them. Make sure that your slides only contain important vocabulary words or an eye-catching picture. This way, your audience isn't too busy concentrating on your slide and will have no other choice but to listen to you. Also, I would suggest for you to include your Knowledge Question on every single slide. This will remind your audience what question you are trying to answer and will make your presentation easier to follow. 

6. Include interesting and exciting elements to you presentation!

TOK presentations can last as long as 30 minutes. That's a pretty long time for an audience to sit down and listen to you ramble on about complicated topics. Make sure that your tone of speaking is interesting enough to engage your audience, and even throw in some funny elements to keep your audience's attention. For example, there was a part of my presentation where we played a clip of a therapist describing the time his patient held a knife up to his neck. To help the audience visualize this scenario, my partner held an actual knife up to my neck while the audio clip was playing! 

I hope these tips will be helpful to you if you are about to embark on a TOK presentation of your own. I'm not going to lie - at first, I saw the task of creating a TOK presentation as an absolute drag! But, with hindsight, I am excited by all of the knowledge I gained and thoroughly enjoyed presenting my findings. 

 

Thanks for reading,

Sophie F.