TOK Presentation Help

[Certified_IB_Cultist]

Does anyone have any advice for TOK Presentations??? My teacher just gave us the rubric and instructions and wants it done in 2 weeks. I'm thinking of doing something about depression, but I don't know how to make it relate back to TOK stuff. I can talk about subjects perfectly fine, but I can't make it relate to TOK.

 

Thanks!

[tokQuestions_com]

Figure out your knowledge question and then go from there.  Depression is a general topic, so you need to narrow it down a bit. What is a common misunderstanding people have about it? It probably stems from from some kind of problem of knowing which in turn will lead you to a knowledge question. Come up with some ideas and share them here. 

[Certified_IB_Cultist]

I came up with two knowledge questions, a broad one and a narrow one:

How does knowledge or the lack thereof impact treatment of diseases? (Broad)

How does incorrect shared knowledge of depression lead to a rise in severe depression and suicide? (Narrow)

I'm thinking of the broader one, since I feel that will allow me to delve deeper into more statistics, maybe statistics of teens, adults, and seniors. For the real life situation, I don't know how comfortable I am going too personal and using my own real life situations, or if I should use other real-life situations with statistics, such as the number of teens or the percentage of teens who are depressed or commit suicide. From there I could go into how knowledge impacts people with depression like the wrong knowledge (oh but you're so happy all the time! you can just snap out of it! You're fine you don't need anything! It's all in your head) and how much we as a society (i can go into different societies, like how USA deals with depression vs how England/Australia/Spain/ect deals with it, then the stats from those countries) are doing. Are we doing enough? Are we doing too much maybe? Are we giving too much of the wrong knowledge? Are we portraying this correctly in an attempt to educate (the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why would be a good example, there's a lot of controversy about that show)?

Thoughts? Thanks again!

[tokQuestions_com]

Lots of good ideas, but you run the risk of making a presentation on depression, rather than a TOK aspect of it. Remember that for presentation (or essay!), your RLS is a starting point, after which you pivot into other ones using the KQ as the connector between them. 

Looking over what you read, the comment you made about how other people think that those depressed can just "snap out of it" or that it's "all in your head" is a similar response that people with autism might get. Why is that? There seems to be a visual aspect at play here: if people can't see it, they don't believe it. After all, they don't make such comments to people in wheelchairs, right?

A KQ related to sense perception could allow you to pivot into other RLS where visual perception or lack of it fools people into some false belief. It all depends on how you pose the question. 

Regarding your own experience with depression, it's sufficient to state that depressed people deal with comments like this, but there's no need to reveal your own experience with depression unless you feel comfortable. Again, the danger is that it might become a presentation on depression rather than problems of knowledge that emerge from our society's attempt to understand it. 

I hope that was helpful 😀

[Sandwich]

You get points in TOK for discussing TOK. Namely how the 'ways of knowing' are used in the different 'areas of knowledge' and the pros and cons of this. This image I found on google sums it up:

It's not about who knowledge is shared with in the sense of basic information dissemination, which is what you seem to be going for. It's about how we come to acquire that knowledge in the first place - ie the 'way of knowledge' we use to get to it. The easiest way to put a topic through the TOK formula would be to ask a 'How do we know?' question. 'How do we know somebody is depressed?'

You've got some good ideas. 13 Reasons Why would be a good leaping point for a presentation, for instance. How did those kids know or not know that one of their peers was depressed? You can use examples from the show to run through some of the most important relevant ways of knowing and how they did and/or did not help those kids to know about how the girl in the show was feeling. That would be both interesting and very TOK-centric, so I imagine if you did a good job of dissecting it you'd score well.