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HowTo: getting and using materials from this site.

About these notes:

• In the course of teaching Theory of Knowledge for a few years, I gradually wrote and rewrote sets of notes to use in my classes. Ideas from philosophy are never far away, but precisely because my own background is in that subject, I always found myself in danger of lecturing to the students, so I tried very hard to find things for them to actually do.

  There clearly is no one best way, or the right way, of teaching the course: different things will work for different teachers and classes, and all I can say is that these notes worked for me and my students (-- I think.)

  • In class, I would usually introduce an area, or a topic or question, and often we would have some 'communal reading,' with students taking turns -- that is the purpose of the passages quoted in these notes. Without this, there is a danger that ThoK-lessons degenerate into the kind of 'deep discussions' that students tend to have on their own late at night.

    Among the ground rules I laid down at the beginning of the course was that no-one would ever be expected to argue for a view that they did not actually hold, but that in return I expected everyone to always express themselves honestly. Another was that while no-one had to speak up, I did expect them to always think along.

  • For the exercises then, we would split into groups, which sometimes became quite fixed after a few months, and I would wander around the room listening to the groups' discussions, occasionally adding something. These group activities felt rather artificial at the beginning of each year, but students soon found it a good way to try out and clarify their ideas. (Usually it was necessary, after the first few weeks, to spend a little time talking about how the groups were working, who was contributing how much, and so on.)

    And at the end of the lesson we would then put the various conclusions together, compare ideas, and so on, and I would make some comments to round things off.

• I continue to return to these notes occasionally, to rewrite them or add things, as I do more reading myself, and have more conversations; topics that I would like to include in future are Language, as a separate section; and perhaps Education. A consequence of this expansion is that the notes have become much too long for a ThoK-course, so anyone using them will have to make a selection -- as I would have to myself.
• In so far as they are mine, I am very happy for anyone to use these notes for non-commercial teaching purposes, but would appreciate it if some acknowledgement was given of where they come from.

  Please feel free to let me have any comments, which is most easily done by using the e-mail form provided; I would particularly appreciate to be told of any more errors. Thank you.

  While I used hard-copies of the notes when I was teaching, for the last few years the up-to-date versions have been in HTML-format only, so they can be viewed and printed, as well as exported as text-files, using an Internet browser, either IE 5.0 or above or NN 6.0 or above.

• Some materials on the IB 'mechanics' of the course, such as essay titles, assessment criteria and hints for essay writing and the presentation, can be found on an Atlantic College website.
• And finally, the reason that I call the course "ThoK," rather than by its usual abbreviation "ToK," is that it makes me feel uncomfortable to split the "Th" of "Theory," which represents the single letter theta in Greek.

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