Last Wednesday the Lower VI IB students went to Oxford for a Theory of Knowledge (ToK) trip. We visited some of Oxford’s museums to try and find artefacts for our ToK exhibition- a piece of coursework where we analyse the role ToK plays in the real world.

We visited the Pitts-River Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Ashmolean. At the Pitts-River Museum we had the privilege of a talk by one of the museum curators where we spoke about the impact of colonialism on the museum and were allowed to handle some of the museum’s artefacts and discuss where they came from. 

Some of our favourite things we saw in the museums includes a USB stick from 2016 (this made us think about when something can be classed as history), a recoloured statue of Emperor Augustus (we discussed whether we can be certain when speculating about the past) and a medicine exhibit (here we talked about how old knowledge can be invalidated).

Overall it was a fun day out and we got lots of inspiration for our ToK exhibition.

Izzy, Lower VI