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Are you currently preparing your TOK exhibition and are unsure which objects to select? You may be wondering whether each object needs to have a personal connection or if you can choose a general one. This post is here to help provide some clarity regarding choosing a TOK exhibition object and how personal it has to be.
Do TOK Exhibition Objects Have To Be Personal?
For the internal assessment portion of the TOK course, students are required to create an exhibition of three objects with accompanying commentaries that explore how TOK manifests in the world around them. The exhibition should consist of 3 descriptions of objects referring to a prompt from a list of 33 exhibition prompts released for each examination session.
Although students may choose TOK exhibition objects that have a personal link to their lives, it is not mandatory to do so. The most important thing to keep in mind for the TOK exhibition is that the chosen objects should clearly be linked to the TOK exhibition prompt and should explain how TOK is applied in the real world through that particular object.
While using personal objects may be helpful for some students in showing the relevance of TOK in their lives, other students may find it more appropriate to use non-personal items for their TOK exhibition. It is ultimately up to you whether the TOK objects you choose are personal or not. That being said, many students choose to use a mix of personal and general TOK items, such as in the exemplars here and here.
Benefits of Using Personal Objects
Unique lens – Using an object that is personal to your life gives your TOK exhibition a unique viewpoint that no other IB student will be able to recreate. This could help your TOK exhibition stand out, especially if the object is something that is unique to your life (e.g. a childhood toy or traditional article of clothing).
Prevents generic explanations – Using an object that is personal to you can help avoid writing generic explanations of how TOK is applied in the real world. For example, using your childhood art sketchbook lets you explore how personal experience shapes artistic knowledge much more meaningfully than analyzing a random art print from the internet.
We hope you found this post helpful in learning more about whether the TOK exhibition objects need to be personal. For more useful materials associated with the IB, check out the wide variety of IA, EE and TOK exemplars available at Clastify.
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