BY Nicki Varkevisser
This article is a basic but interesting reference to use in the classroom.
Triple A Learning IB Blogs
April 21, 2012
February 3, 2012
Book/Cover/Race/Sense Perception
With my wife recently called for jury duty and the subsequent discussions about the role of the citizen in the justice system, I decided to do some research. A recent controversy in the UK caught my eye. In this article, “Twitter fury over ‘surprise rape’ article gets UniLad suspended“ it was claimed that “head of the CPS in London has said that jurors’ preconceptions about women has a negative impact on rape conviction rates.”
It reminded me of a story I used to use in class discussions. A researcher in the late 1970s became concerned about racial stereotypes after an instance with his son. He was driving through a city in America when a black man ran across the road. He son apparently turned and said some along the lines of ‘I wonder who he has just robbed’. The strong association of a black man running and a crime having been committed shocked the father. A former student emailed me a number of years ago with a follow-up story to this discussion. In response to a heated debate, a group of British students has run a very informal experiment. They chose 4 London underground stations from 4 different socio-demographic backgrounds and staged an event in each of them. Casual observations where made, and they used these to draw a conclusion. The event was a young man running down the platform. How would London travellers react to this event at each station?In the course of 20 minutes and a turnover of passengers, they watched and gauged the reactions of the passengers to a ‘white man’, an ‘Indian man’, a ‘black man’ and a ‘Muslim man’ running down the platform. My former student was intrigued by the methodology of this experiment and sent me some reflections, partly to see if his TOK skills were still up to scratch and partly to give me fodder for the classroom. They certainly were, but he could not find fault with the conclusions they drew.
Well, in response to the first part, I tried to find the reference to the head of the CPS (in London). I came up with a report from Professor Cheryl Thomas, titled, ‘Are juries fair?’. Fascinatingly, she is a member of the Centre for Empirical Legal Studies in the Faculty of Laws at University College London. The descriptor ‘empirical’ in this title caught my eye.The report Professor Thomas wrote was from ‘Analytical Services’ which claims to support ‘effective policy development and delivery within the Ministry of Justice by providing high-quality social research, statistics and economic analysis to influence decision-making and encourage informed debate’. Again, the claim ‘high-quality social research, statistics and economic analysis’ caught my eye.
The topic heavily engages with the issue of reason, language, emotion and perception and leads to the issue of methodology in the human sciences.
The Summary (p. i) provides a good insight into its worth as a stimulus for discussion:
“Summary
This research asks: How fair is the jury decision-making process? It explores a number of aspects of jury fairness for the first time in this country, and asks specifically:
- Do all-White juries discriminate against BME defendants?
February 2, 2012
space cats
Take 3 minutes out of your day to watch this splendid spoof. You might even want to use it in class if you’ve been talking about either the human tendency to see faces in random shapes (pareidolia, relevant to sense perception) or manipulation of photographs. After some serious treatment, you may want to lighten the class with a laugh.
Eileen Dombrowski
August 10, 2011
“Mathematics transcends all cultures and binds us”
My favourite quotation today is from physicist Janna Levin: “Part of what we can contribute to allay human suffering is a perspective on our place in the world, on our total interconnectedness as a species, on the absurdity of hatred and violence. Mathematics transcends all cultures and binds us. Abstract knowledge may seem to have nothing to do with any of us and yet has to do with all of us.”
Janna Levin,a speaker on TED, made this comment on May 17, 2011 in the follow-up discussion from a video posted of a talk she had given. Her TED talk on “The sound the universe makes” is extremely interesting. But “sound”? I leave it to you to decide the relationship between this sound and sense perception, or sense perception and technology. Sadly, both the ancient “music of the spheres” and this immensely updated version are far beyond my hearing range.
May 19, 2011
Google art project, virtual museums
What a splendid resource for TOK! In this TED video, Amit Sood takes us through a virtual museum of museums, accessible free online. Very few teachers can take their students on a live trip to an art museum – but through the Google Art Project’s virtual museums we can all have the simulated experience and the stimulation it provides for some good discussion on a range of knowledge issues. A lot of them are crowding my mind, so I’ll just note a few that bubble to the surface for me, and invite you to all comments on how you might use this resource.
First, I’d want to project one of the museum room as a film for the class and wander with them through a few rooms. I would give the wandering control to an interested student.
February 21, 2011
the newest oldest thing: science in action
“This ‘candidate galaxy’ – so-called because it could turn out to be something much less exciting – marks the latest entry in a quickening deep-space race among astronomers to find ever-older objects….Writing in the journal Nature, Bouwens and his team say they are 80% certain the object is, in fact, an ancient galaxy.” So writes Brian Vastag this week regarding a discovery made by the Hubble telescope of the oldest object yet identified in deep space.
The article provides abundant material for a class on knowledge in the sciences. Simply giving students the article with a key question would be likely to stimulate plenty of contributions: “Is this discovery characteristic of science? How?”
February 17, 2011
too cold: fact or value judgment?
When is it simply too cold? An opinion poll on the Weather Network gives us choices: 0 degrees celsius, -5, -20, or never. (For those of you who work on the farenheit scale, that’s 32, 23, -4, or never.) Having had reason to ask myself this very question recently as I went out skiing at -30 celsius, I was keenly interested in the poll results. Nearly 100,000 people voted, with 71% settling on -20 C. A whopping 12%, though, voted “I love winter so it’s never too cold.”
With an appalling inevitability, I start to think of the difference between facts (the measured temperature) and value judgments and opinions (too cold), and to think of an opinion poll like this one to raise discussion in class. I even start mentally to add other questions to the class opinion poll, considering offering them gaggingly sweet fudge to eat (too sweet?/how much sugar by measure?) and large suitcases to lift (too heavy?/how many kilograms or pounds?).
January 29, 2011
stereotypes: the black athlete
In reading this quotation from Ben Carrington’s recent book Race, Sport, and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora, Laurie Taylor, British sociologist and radio interviewer, opens an interview with the author. Carrington makes an extremely interesting argument regarding racial ideology and the stereotype of the black athlete, putting forward a heavyweight boxing match in 1908 as a pivotal moment in ideas of white supremacy.
January 25, 2011
A lift of the heart!
The snow is fresh. A low winter sun pools deep shadows around the dark evergreen firs. I take in the sensation of skis on the snow, my breath coming more deeply, and a flood of sunshine sparkling thousands of frost crystals. And then, here it comes, in a rush: that lift of the heart!
Do you know what I’m talking about? If so, what ways of knowing are, for you, coming into play? In TOK we distinguish between sense perception and emotion – but is it possible, in a given moment, that the physical sensation (“lift of the heart”) and the emotion (joy) are indistinguishable?
