Week 8 Overview and Assignments

In week 8 Monday (3/4), we discussed Chapter 12 jigsaw readings on Historical Method.  We pressed one another to explain the sections of the chapter in ways that went beyond “fact mining”.  In the future, you should begin to focus your chapter reading presentations each week with the following questions:

1. Give a brief overview of your section with reference to page numbers.
2. Decide on the 5 specific and important TOK observations from your section.  Avoid menial facts.
3.   Develop a Problem of Knowledge question from your section.
4.     Is it something you would want to research in the future?  Does it affect your extended essay or TOK assessment focus? How?

From our discussion, there were the pertinent summary ideas, as well as some Problems of Knowledge from chapter 12:

1.  The debate on histiography is a CURRENT one involving a continual evaluation of historical claims through a scientific, political, religious, and cultural perspectives, often with major discrepancy.
2. Citing various examples (such as the Japanese textbook controversy and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict), chapter 12 highlights some of the important perspectives in current discussion of history, as well as its synthesis with other areas of knowing such as ethics and language.
3. Chapter 12 divides the information into sections interacting with the ways of knowing, identifying important questions concerning facts v. context (sense perception), imaginative framework for meaningful historical dialogue (emotion), logical framework that reduces error and creates coherence and validity (reason) and various sources/schools of thought associated with historical narrative development (language). 
4. Lastly, Ch. 12 identifies various methodologies for describing the historical process, including Kuhn’s cycle of paradigm shifts (will return in Ch. 10).  It is this emphasis on historical revision which is the focus of your second formal Socratic Seminar (3/11).  Regarding the historian, ch. 12 takes methodologies and applies it to the portraits of the learners inside the specific scheme; ultimately contrasting the wise and compassionate (Buddhist), the Just and the Loyal (judeo-christian-islamic), the gentlemen scholar (confucius) and balanced rationalism (Greece/Enlightenment).

On Week 8 Wednesday (3/6), I modeled a discussion of one of the TOK question you will be answering for the Socratic Seminar.  My emphasis was on the nature of borders in relation to cultural clashes, identity, emotional impact, and historical development.  My examples included:

1. The development of Alcatraz and its transitory symbolic presence from a dark island to the strength of the Federal Justice system, to a protest site for Native American solidarity, to finally a museum.
2.  The first and second crusades as a clash of religious, political, and economic ideology between the English, French, Byzantines, Jews, and the various Muslim kingdoms through the East.  Each has a distinct view of the event, and the reliability of the accounts is challenged by the bias and distance  in our earliest record.
3.  The current Palestinian-israeli conflict in terms of border changes, perspectives on just war and ownership of land, statistics on ratio of causalities, and a picture focusing on the emotional impact of human loss towards an argument for “Sustainable History”.
4. The controversy surrounding Homo Floresiensis and the competing models of early human history (research “Out-of-Africa” theory vs. the “Multi-regional” theory), offering up perspectives on the borders between species (as opposed to simply divisions of land).

Your homework for Week 8:

1. Complete the “Historical Method 2: Socratic Seminar Research Week” document in your managebac messages (linked above).
2. As part of your packet, choose with your team (completed in class today), one of the three TOK questions to answer:
1. Citing specific examples, analyze the quote: “History tells us more about the person who wrote it than about the people being written about” .  Reference at least two areas of knowing and two ways of knowing.
2. How does one’s historical “lens” into the past affect both the educational use, and the political use, of history in the present?
3. What teleology, if any, exists in the potential patterns of history?  Reference two areas of knowing.
3. Choose a specific example (use your blog topics as reference) to research as part of your discussion.  Include TOK vocabulary explained in this week’s document.

Lastly, I have messaged you the template for the Extended Essay.  The hard deadline for your current work (including the lit review, advisor meeting, formal proposal, and outline) is 4/17/13.