Teaching History in TOK

Last week I came away from a TOK lesson feeling that I had reached the pinnacle of my career and that perhaps I should pack in teaching immediately, so as to leave on a high. Who would have thought such a feeling possible in these restricted lockdown days?

Back in the good old days, when the school was all up and running, we would take 6B students to the museum ‘Lugar de la Memoria’ which is an ideal place for students to explore how sources are used to create History, how there is always several ways to tell the stories from the past, what place ‘emotion’ has in History, and to reflect on the purpose and relevance of History in our world today.

And here we are in 2020, teaching History in TOK again and there is no way to visit this Museum. It felt like a wonderful learning opportunity was lost.

Our TOK team work paid off .. Alex Gerritsen sent us an article in which a certain Prof. talked about having his students go out and gather their own source material for a History project. Which had me thinking ….. Instead of guiding the students around the sources in LUM, we could ask them to interview their relatives and find their own source material.

So I set up a project which was student led learning, flipped learning, collaborative, interactive (well beyond the classroom) and student motivation was sky high.

My TOK class created groups of 3 or 4, and were tasked to find several people who were involved in the revolutionary days of the 1980s and 1990s and interview them, asking them to describe their experiences. They then had to come together and present their sources and reflect, TOK-wise, on them.

1. Reflect on what emotion is contained within these ‘sources’ and whether this distorts the material, or provides knowledge to the Historian

2. Consider how they could ‘triangulate’ or verify these sources

3. Suggest how they would incorporate this material in a ‘Story’ style History of their country B and final slide

4. What arguments would they use to persuade the Peruvian Ministry of Education to teach this part of Peru’s History from diverse perspectives

Every single student spoke to a close relative and interviewed them about these dramatic events. Even my student who recently arrived from Venezuela, went out of her way to find a PE teacher in Lima to interview, who was an active member of Sandero at the time.

Here is one slide from their research:-

The students were so interested in the stories that had gathered, that they went online to see whether these events had been recorded in the press at the time, some of them scoured the ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ documents to look for the events described to them. They discovered how little was ever reported from the provinces and how much suffering was endured but never recorded. They came to understand the anxiety felt by their parents and grandparents in those days and how that most likely has increased the anxiety they feel in these days. One student’s grandmother spent 8 years, painting the names of people who were killed during this time. For her, they were all victims, but when she created her installation in public, it was defaced and graffitied over by people thinking that the names included those of the terrorists. (The artist didn’t know and didn’t think it important - they were all killed). We discussed the relationship between Art and History; whether History should be told by the victors, what place emotion has in source material and how to include the voices of the less powerful.

This is always a great topic we teach in TOK, creating engaging discussion and provoking our students to think carefully about whose counts and who should write it, but this year, finding one way forward blocked, we found another that was, in the end, even better.