Eileen Dombrowski
Triple A Learning IB Blogs
January 14, 2012
Make those circles pulse!
December 1, 2011
MSF, the arts, and ways of knowing
Today’s regular newsletter from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)/Doctors without Borders highlights two current projects that use the arts effectively to convey important social issues: a stunning photographic essay with accompanying stories presents slum-dwelling Urban Survivors and a fundraising album of music called Positive Generation compiles songs about the challenges of living with HIV/AIDS. MSF is very deliberately choosing images, stories, and songs as a way of reaching an audience (you and me) – informing us, engaging our interest, and (hopefully) making us care. In doing so, it provides us in TOK with fine examples for discussion of the connection between ways of knowing and the arts, with the relevance to the world sought by the whole IB programme.
October 23, 2011
October 21, 2011
August 24, 2011
Japanese rice field art
I was so amazed to see images created in their rice fields by Japanese farmers that I even checked Snopes to find out whether this story was simply a myth in email circulation. Snopes confirms that it’s true (and I thus raise obliquely a few further questions about truth tests!). Then I found a story in The Guardian — from two years ago. Did everyone but me already know about this? An article in The Japan Times (from four years ago) gives further details: “by precisely planting four varieties of rice with differently colored leaves in fields their ancestors have farmed for centuries, the people of Inakadate Village have this year grown remarkable reproductions of famous woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).”
The elaborate images are designed to be viewed from above and created entirely through the placing of different plants. Japan Times staff writer Yoko Hani explains:
June 9, 2011
Throne of Weapons
This chair was solo in a display case. From a distance, it caught my eye — and my curiosity. Since I was in the British Museum in London, already I had expectations as I approached it. After all, this was the museum where I’d just been marveling at the ancient carvings of Assyrian lion hunts and at statues from ancient Egypt. I had pulled my husband with me, then, to show him one of my favourite things in the museum that he hadn’t yet seen, some beautiful bronze plaques from Benin. I was expecting everything in this part of the museum also to be ancient and marvelous.
It was indeed from Africa but it wasn’t old. My first shock was to realize that the chair was made of modern weapons, some very grim-looking guns. My second jolt was to realize in the labeling that the chair was called a throne, an ultimate symbol of power and control: the Throne of Weapons. As the throne sat surrounded by art and artifacts that reflected some of the cultural history of different parts of Africa, I was choked by the powerful symbolic fusion of the guns and the throne to convey much of the reality of today, of power held by force.
May 11, 2011
April 27, 2011
playing for its own sake
http://mandaflewaway.tumblr.com/post/2057242738 Go to this blog and make some music. If you like it, consider how you might use it with your students.
For the fun and the effect of this activity, all your students need to have access to the internet. They have to do the music-making themselves. If you have them writing reflective blogs, for instance, you might give them this link and let them play around with it on their own time, following with some questions on whether or not they considered themselves to involved in artistic creation (and why, or why not?).
March 8, 2011
International Women’s Day and TOK
Happy International Women’s Day on its 100th anniversary! Wandering through web media on this event, I’m intrigued by how many things it represents. (UN Women video, Michelle Bachelet ) It’s a celebration, certainly, of women’s achievements and women’s roles, attended in some countries by demonstrations of appreciation. (I quite like the idea of being given flowers!) It’s also a time of appreciation of all those – women and men, governments and organizations – who champion the rights of women. Clearly, though, it is also a time to recognize continued inequalities, violence against women, and denial of rights; gaining security and equality continues to be a struggle across the world. In any context where global citizenship is the focus, the relevance of the day may be self-evident. What, though, is the relevance to Theory of Knowledge, a course on critical thinking?
One of the most important goals of teaching TOK is to connect an exploration of knowledge issues which takes us into concepts with a grounded reality that demonstrates the relevance and importance of critical thinking skills. And so, here are just a few ways that I’d introduce International Women’s Day myself.
June 17, 2010
doggy concert howling success: aesthetic (?) judgment
A concert entirely for dogs, premiered outside the Sydney Opera House in Australia June 5, was apparently a howling success. “Hundreds of dogs and their owners bounced around as Anderson entertained them with 20 minutes of thumping beats, whale calls, whistles and a few high-pitched electronic sounds imperceptible to human ears.” The music was composed by Laurie Anderson, inspired by Yo Yo Ma. The video embedded in a BBC site (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/asia_pacific/10246438.stm) gave me a huge smile. The TOK question is…what? Well, it would be most obviously a story to lighten sense perception, dealing with the limits of human range of hearing. It might be more fun to use, though, to provoke discussion on judgment in the arts. Whose judgments (don’t) count?
Eileen Dombrowski
