Theory of Knowledge: Pre- and post-lesson support for IB TOK students and teachers.

QUOMODO SCIMUS - TOK

Quomodo Scimus is a multimedia resource for IB Theory of Knowledge, built to sit alongside TOK lessons and textbooks rather than replace them. There are materials designed to help students find or support ideas for the Exhibition from the Knowledge and the Knower Core and the options on Language and Technology. There are also sections for the five areas of knowledge that form the basis of the essay: History, Human Science, Maths, Natural Science and the Arts. Across the site: there are 36 TOK 'provocations', one for every page, opening onto 119 Big Ideas and 243 genuinely open questions to think through afterwards. Along the way it points you to 89 films and 187 books for further reading and viewing.

Knowledge and the Knower

Politics

Religion

Indigenous Societies

The interactive diagram opposite outlines the structure. There are eight 'lessons' for the core Knowledge and the Knower and four in the options and Areas of Knowledge.

Every page on the site works from the same Knowledge Framework: Scope, Perspectives, Methods and Tools, and Ethics. Each opens with a provocation, a story, image, or example that raises a question, moves through three or four Big Ideas built around a specific thinker or case and closes with a Think Further section of five or six genuinely open questions, plus Films and Further Reading pointing you to what to read or watch next.

Core lessons and Optional Themes prepare you for the Exhibition. The core spreads the framework across eight dedicated lessons, two per stage; each Optional Theme covers the same four stages in four pages instead. Every one of these pages ends with three Exhibition Connections, tying it to specific prompts from the official 35.

Areas of Knowledge prepare you for the essay. They cover the same four stages, one page each. Each Big Idea sits alongside a "compared" section, setting that AOK's approach against the others. For essay preparation specifically, every AOK page also has a Reader: a separate document of extracts pulled directly from the books referenced on that page, verified against the source and citable on their own.

Raison d'être

This website is designed for my students, if you find it useful, great, but it was not built for you. My TOK lessons are bilingual French-English and this website can be translated in the browser which is not the case with a textbook, but essential for my students. It is designed to be viewed on their iPads and displayed on my classroom whiteboard. Secondly, this is my website made to support my lessons. TOK has no subject content that must be taught and no exam that checks that it has been taught. What gets taught and how it gets taught very much reflects the interests, obsessions and proclivities of the TOK teacher. There is no book that does that for my lessons. Thirdly, there are films and interactivities which cannot happen in a textbook. I am a frustrated film-studies teacher and if I could teach TOK via film alone I probably would. This website reflects that.

Finally, a website is current and does not have to be out of date. There is an inevitable conservatism with textbooks that this website hopes to avoid. 25 years ago when I first started teaching TOK I approached the teaching as the politics and philosophy student that I had been. Look at faces at the top and bottom of the page. On the left are the faces of those early lessons, dominated by dead, white, male philosophers. On the right are the faces of those I have read in the last 25 years. Almost all of the content of this website is made up of ideas from the books of authors I have read since starting to teach TOK. It also has a blog that I intend to use to offload the ideas that come to me as I read the news.

More about those authors. Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error (1994), and Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007) were genuine turning points for me, as was Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (2005). Kahneman anchors Core Lesson 6, Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis runs through Core Lesson 3, and Lehrer's book sits in Perspective in the Arts. I remember reading Damasio and Ben Goldacre's Bad Science (2008), used in Methods and Tools of Natural Science, well out of my comfort zone, given my own training is in philosophy, history, and politics. Over the last 25 years of teaching TOK I have read considerably more neuroscience and psychology than history. That is why I love this course.

A lot of the content draws on work published in the last 10 years. For example, Ethics in Mathematics draws on Joy Buolamwini's Unmasking AI (2023), on facial recognition systems that fail to accurately read darker-skinned faces, Angela Saini's Superior (2019), on how race science persists in respectable disguise inside contemporary genetics and medicine, and Hannah Fry's Hello World (2018), on where algorithms make better decisions than people and where they quietly don't. Scope of History uses Hilary Mantel's 2017 BBC Reith Lectures, published as The Day Is for the Living, on what historians owe the dead and what the past can't actually give back. Perspective in Human Science draws on Yanis Varoufakis's Talking to My Daughter About the Economy (2019), which tells the origins of capitalism and inequality as a story rather than a set of graphs. Ethics in Technology uses Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), which argues that behavioural data itself has become a new kind of capital. Methods and Tools in Language draws on Maryanne Wolf's Reader, Come Home (2018), on what reading on a screen does to the brain's capacity for deep reading. Ethics of Natural Science uses Jennifer Doudna's A Crack in Creation (2017), in which the co-inventor of CRISPR writes about what it means to hold a tool that can rewrite DNA. Ethics of the Arts draws on Dan Hicks's The Brutish Museums (2020), the case for returning the Benin Bronzes and other looted colonial-era objects. And Core Lesson 6 works from Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber's The Enigma of Reason (2017), which argues reason evolved to win arguments, not to find truth.

Check out the 'about' page for more background or if you'd like to contact me.

Richard Jones-Nerzic,

Nyon, July 2026