Writing the Exhibition

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The TOK exhibition is an essential component (worth 33% of final grade) of the IB TOK course, providing students with an opportunity to connect abstract knowledge questions with 3 tangible, real-world objects. Showcasing your exhibition to your teachers and peers is not part of the official grading. This guide covers everything from understanding the purpose of the exhibition to exemplar writings, ensuring a high-quality submission.

Purpose: To explore how TOK concepts manifest in the real world by analyzing three specific objects in relation to a prescribed IA prompt.

Scope: The exhibition is not a personal opinion piece; it’s a critical reflection on how knowledge is produced, shared, and applied in everyday contexts, using tangible objects as evidence.

Word Count Limit: 950

Assessment Criteria

Does the exhibition successfully show how TOK manifests in the world around us?

Possible Characteristics

IA Prompts (last updated: 2022)

The 35 IA prompts for the TOK exhibition are thought-provoking questions that explore how knowledge operates in real-world contexts. Students choose one prompt to anchor their analysis, using three specific objects to illustrate their response and demonstrate their understanding of key TOK concepts.

While the prompts remain largely consistent over time, the IB reviews and updates the list periodically (currently assumed to be around 4-5 years) to ensure relevance and alignment with evolving educational goals. It is important for students to confirm they are working with the most current set of prompts for their assessment year.

Selecting the right IA prompt is critical for crafting a compelling ToK Exhibition. The prompt serves as the foundation for your exploration of real-world objects and their connection to ToK Concepts.

Understand the Purpose of the Prompt

The prompt serves as the foundation of your exhibition. It frames your analysis of knowledge concepts and how they relate to real-world objects.

Each prompt is an open-ended question that allows you to explore knowledge questions. Your goal is to create a clear, thoughtful, and personalized response through objects.

Identify Your Strengths and Interests

Your personal interest will make the process more engaging and meaningful.

Think about your strengths, preferred Areas of Knowledge (AOKs), and objects that fascinate you.

Shortlist ~3 Prompts

By narrowing your options, you reduce choice paralysis and focus on the most promising prompts.

Pick prompts that you feel comfortable answering with potential objects in mind.

Choose 1 Prompt with Strong Objects and Concepts

You want a clear and manageable focus.

Select the prompt that feels most personal, interesting, and conceptually rich.

Ask yourself these questions:

2.2 Selecting the Best IA Prompt

Selecting effective and strong objects is essential for a high scoring exhibition. Your objects should not only be personally relevant and interesting to explore your chosen prompt but also allow for meaningful connections to ToK concepts.

Since demonstrating personal connections with your chosen objects is crucial for the exhibition, using ideas for objects from AI sources is not recommended (since it will not know what objects you own). However, using them as idea starters to help you find objects that convey a similar idea is okay.

Checklist for Individual Objects:

Is your object tangible and specific?

Objects must be real, not hypothetical or abstract.

Objects should have a clear story or background that connects to the prompt.

Does your object align with the prompt?

Objects must directly relate to the questions posed by the prompt.

Objects should allow you to explore ToK concepts (e.g., evidence, perspective, truth).

The combination of your three objects is crucial for creating a cohesive, conceptually rich, and engaging ToK exhibition.

Checklist for Combination of All Three Objects:

Altogether, are your objects of different types?

2.3 Choosing Effective Objects

The TOK exhibition is centered around one IA prompt, explored through three specific objects that exemplify the chosen prompt. Each object requires a written commentary of approximately 315 words, where students explain how the object connects to the prompt and illustrates key TOK concepts. The exhibition does not require an overall introduction or conclusion. Instead, the focus is on clear, concise analysis of each object in isolation, while maintaining a consistent connection to the chosen prompt throughout.

a. Background

Introduce the object and identify its specific real-world context.

What is it? Where is it from?

Explain your personal connection with the object.

Keep the paragraph shorter than 100 words.

2.4 Structuring the Exhibition

Essay

“What challenges are raised by the dissemination and/or communication of knowledge?”

The TOK prompt I have selected is: “What challenges are raised by the dissemination and/or communication of knowledge?”. This exhibition explores this prompt by reflecting on knowledge and language, and more specifically on whether subtext and connotation always create confusion rather than help us to communicate knowledge. The language we use in our everyday lives can often be interpreted many different ways by different people, depending on their cultural background, beliefs, ideologies, affiliations, personal experiences etc. In particular it seems that subtext and connotation can be particularly challenging as they are often only recognised by people that share some particular knowledge or experiences, and it seems that they can easily be interpreted very differently by different people which can cause confusion and hinder communication of knowledge.

Object 1. Starbucks holiday cup

This cup was used by Starbucks in 2017 and was controversial because some people viewed the symbol of the two hands holding hands on the cup as a sign that Starbucks was promoting a homosexual agenda, because they saw the cups as having an LGBT subtext. However, many other people just saw the cup as spreading joy and love during the holiday season and did not think that there was any particular subtext at all.

This cup is particularly interesting for this exhibition because a Starbucks spokesman said that they had intentionally designed the cup so that customers could interpret it in their own way, which suggests that they were deliberately trying to communicate in an open or vague way rather than seeing the disagreement this might cause as being negative/ a challenge. In this way, the cup highlights how confusion arising from the use of subtext can be useful or can actually even be used by people intentionally to provoke discussion. The cup generated a lot of media attention for the company while still allowing them to say that how the cup was to be interpreted was up to their individual customers to decide.

This cup also enriches this exhibition because both some members of the LGBT community and also some members of the right-wing media and public saw the cups as promoting same sex relationships. While both of these different groups interpreted the cup this way, their reaction was very different, with one seeing this as very positive and one being very upset about it. Yet other people didn’t see this subtext at all. So in this particular case it wasn’t only that the subtext itself was only seen or understood by some groups and not others, but also that the reaction to that subtext also differed very dramatically.

Object 2. My Chinese-English Translation Dictionary

This object is a dictionary I use to help me translate between Chinese and English. When we think about how language is translated so that it can be communicated between people who speak different languages we can see that this poses many challenges to communication of knowledge, particularly because of the way that language uses connotations, euphemisms, proverbs and idioms that go beyond the literal meaning of a word.

The meaning and true essence behind many words and phrases is often unique to a specific language and the cultural/historical understanding that comes with an intimate knowledge only a native speaker can acquire, particularly things like connotation where language can have not only its literal translation but also can have secondary meanings.

Essay

“Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?”

Object 1: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a novel that was published in 1958. It tells the story of the Igbo people (a Nigerian tribe) and their deeply rooted cultural and religious practices. Achebe infuses his writing with cultural references and literary devices (such as “Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan”) that show how the Igbo people understand their world. Their economy is based on agriculture, so they have specific words like “harmattan” which represents the dry and dusty season. This knowledge may seem strange and foreign to me, but this is crucial knowledge for the Igbo people to have because if they plant their yams during this season they will not survive. Achebe was born in an Igbo town and is part of this community of knowers, so he understands the Igbo people and shares their knowledge.

As a white girl from an affluent town, I read about other cultures and through studying them in school, I respect and appreciate them. However, I also must acknowledge that I will never be able to fully understand them, as I was not born into this culture and I don’t think that anyone outside of a culture or community can truly know things in the same way as someone inside it. People see the world through the paradigms that are created through their personal experiences, so culture is a lens that every person sees the world through.

Things Fall Apart serves to spread knowledge about Igbo culture, but the only people who truly know these cultural aspects and the people who this knowledge belongs to are the Igbo people. Without reading this book, I never would have heard of the Igbo people. After reading the book, I was in awe of the fact that there was an entire culture I had never heard of. This highlighted my ignorance even further, in my naive belief that I would ever be able to know of every culture. While I will never be able to truly know Igbo culture or be part of that community of knowers, I now appreciate it because Achebe chooses to share his story to enrich any individual’s pursuit of knowledge.

Object 2: “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugar Hill Gang

“Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugar Hill Gang in 1979 was the first rap song to be played on the radio. It angered many of the originators of Hip Hop because it did not tell the true story of young, poor black men, and was heavily influenced by disco, the white style of music that Hip Hop artists were trying to dissociate from.

This song was labeled as “Hip Hop” but through radio this song left the neighborhood parties of the Bronx and entered the homes of affluent white teenagers in the Upper East Side. But it did not accurately portray the struggles of the originators of Hip Hop.