May 2027 TOK Essay Title 1: The Artist or the Historian

1. Title decoded · 2. Hidden assumptions · 3. Knowledge questions · 4. TOK concept map

5. Three thesis positions · 6. Angles inside each area of knowledge · 7. Argument map · 8. Perspectives

9. Twelve verified examples, each on its own card · 10. Overused examples

11. Paragraph blueprint · 12. Word budget · 13. Implications bank · 14. Conclusion options · 15. Pitfalls

16. Top-band checklist · 17. Teacher interactions (TK/PPF) · 18. Glossary · 19. Bibliography

Sustained focus on the title

Every paragraph answers this title, including the word “better”, not a general question about art and history.

Sections 1, 5, 14

Linked effectively to areas of knowledge

The arts and history are analysed as ways of producing knowledge, and compared directly.

Sections 6, 7

Arguments clear, coherent and effectively supported by specific examples

Each claim rests on a named, dated, real example that is analysed, not just described.

Sections 7, 9, 11

Implications of arguments are considered

You explain what follows if your argument is right, for knowers and for knowledge.

Section 13

Clear awareness and evaluation of different points of view

Other views are weighed, and you say why one is stronger in a given case.

Sections 7, 8

Insightful, convincing, accomplished, lucid

The IB's own list of characteristics for this band. Clarity and originality count.

Sections 2, 9, 15

“Do we gain”

“We” is the audience: readers, viewers, students, the public. The title is about what reaches the knower, not only what the artist or historian knows.

Treating “we” as universal. Different audiences gain different things from the same work (see Example 11).

“a better appreciation”

A comparison, so you need a criterion for “better”. “Appreciation” is wider than knowledge: it can mean understanding, empathy, or recognising value.

Never defining “better”, so the conclusion cannot actually judge.

“the human experience”

The definite article suggests one shared experience. Ask whether that exists. The phrase can mean what it felt like to live through something, or what happened to people collectively.

Writing about historical events instead of human experience of them.

“from the artist or the historian”

The focus is on the knower who produces the account, not just on the area of knowledge. “Or” sets up a choice between two roles.

Answering “both are important” without choosing, or not noticing when one person plays both roles.

“Discuss with reference to the arts and history”

Both areas of knowledge are fixed. You cannot swap either one.

Letting one area dominate. Aim for a roughly equal split.

Can knowing what an experience felt like count as knowledge, or is it only empathy or belief?

Whose experiences reach us, and who decides which ones are remembered: the artist, the historian or the audience?

How do imagination and evidence each justify claims about what people lived through?

What responsibilities do artists and historians have when they represent the suffering of real people?

Does freedom from the demands of evidence make art less able, or more able, to convey the truth of an experience?

Evidence

Methods and tools

Historians must corroborate claims from sources. Artists may use evidence selectively, or none at all. Is emotional power a kind of evidence?

Truth

Scope

Distinguish factual truth (what happened) from experiential truth (what it was like). Art may be false in fact and true in experience.

Interpretation

Methods and tools

Both interpret. The historian is constrained by sources; the artist by form, audience and intention.

Perspective

Perspectives

Whose viewpoint is centred? A perpetrator's family (Example 1), a bomb-maker (Example 11), a survivor (Examples 8 and 9).

Certainty

Scope

History's numbers are often contested; the Bhopal death toll varies widely by source (Example 3). Does art avoid this problem or ignore it?

Objectivity

Methods and tools

Is objectivity even a goal for artists? Can a historian be objective about suffering?

Justification

Methods and tools

What counts as a good reason to accept an account: footnotes, testimony, or the recognition an audience feels?

Explanation

Scope

History usually explains causes. Art usually conveys experience. Is explaining an experience the same as appreciating it?

Power

Perspectives

Who controls memory? State silence over Tulsa (Example 10), colonial looting of Benin art (Example 6), a government commissioning a memorial (Example 4).

Culture

Perspectives

In some cultures art and history are not separate (Example 5). The title's either/or may be a cultural assumption.

Values

Ethics

What each chooses to show or omit reveals values. Omission can be a deliberate artistic choice (Examples 1, 4 and 11).

Responsibility

Ethics

Should art that shapes public memory carry a label? (Example 12). Do historians owe a duty to those whose stories were silenced?

The artist gives the better appreciation of what an experience felt like from the inside; the historian gives the better appreciation of what happened to people collectively and why.

It gives a precise criterion for “better” and applies it consistently. It also allows real evaluation in both areas of knowledge.

It can slide into “both are good”. You must still judge which kind of appreciation matters more for the title's phrase “the human experience”.

An appreciation built on inaccurate or partial accounts is a misappreciation. The historian's method makes appreciation trustworthy, and art is most valuable when it rests on history.

It is a clear, arguable stance that many students will not take, which helps it read as insightful.

It can undervalue what art uniquely offers. Your counter-claims must be strong, not token.

The best appreciation comes when the roles merge: oral historians working like artists, artists working like investigators, and cultures where art is history.

Challenging the title's assumption shows insight, and the examples for it are unusual.

It can look like dodging the question. You must still say whether the artist or the historian is closer to the best appreciation, and why.

The arts

Film (fiction or documentary drama): Examples 1, 10, 11, 12

Film, Language A, English B

The arts

Literature (novels, short stories): Example 2

Language A, Hindi A, English A

The arts

Visual art, installation and memorials: Examples 4, 5, 6

Visual Arts, Design Technology

The arts

Photography, which sits between art and record: Example 3

Visual Arts, Global Politics

History

Oral history and testimony: Examples 8, 9

History (any paper), Global Politics

History

Official inquiries and commission reports: Example 10

History, Global Politics

History

Museums, archives and public history: Examples 5, 6

History, Social and Cultural Anthropology

History

Investigation and evidence reconstruction: Example 7

History, Physics, Computer Science

They own the experience. Their response tests whether art or history has been faithful to it (Examples 8, 9, 11).

Testimony is powerful but also shaped by memory, trauma and time. One witness is not all witnesses.

Appreciating human experience may require understanding those who caused suffering (Example 1).

Risk of making perpetrators sympathetic. Ask what the work gains and loses by this viewpoint.

Sets a standard of method: sources, corroboration, context (Examples 8, 10).

Historians have positions too. Butalia began from her own family's story (Example 8). Is that a weakness or a strength?

Chooses form, focus and omission deliberately (Examples 2, 4).

Intention and reception can differ. What the artist meant is not always what audiences take away.

Challenges the Western split between art and history (Example 5).

Outsiders may have only partial access; some knowledge is restricted by cultural protocol.

The title asks what “we” gain. Critics worried viewers would take drama as history (Example 12).

Audiences differ in background knowledge. “Better” may depend on who is appreciating.

Governments and museums commission, fund and control memory (Examples 4, 6, 10).

Official memory can serve power. Ask who benefits from each account.

1

The Zone of Interest (film, 2023)

Both

Less common

2

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree (novel, 2018; English 2021)

Claim

Rare

3

Photographs of the Bhopal gas disaster (1984)

Both

Rare

4

Fragmentos by Doris Salcedo (counter-monument, Bogotá, 2018)

Claim

Rare

5

Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters (exhibition, 2017; New Delhi 2025–26)

Reframe

Rare

6

The Benin Bronzes and their return (1897 to 2022)

Both

Less common

7

Forensic Architecture and the Saydnaya prison model (2016)

Reframe

Rare

8

Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence (history, 1998)

Claim

Less common

9

The 1947 Partition Archive (oral history, 2010 onward)

Claim

Less common

10

The Tulsa Race Massacre, the 2001 report and HBO's Watchmen (2019)

Both

Less common

11

Oppenheimer (2023) as received in Japan (March 2024)

Counter

Less common

12

The Crown and the “fictional dramatisation” label (2022)

Counter

Less common

The arts: film

Jonathan Glazer's film follows the family of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, in their house and garden beside the camp. The killing is almost never shown; it is heard, through a constant background of sound. The film is loosely based on Martin Amis's 2014 novel and draws on the memoir Höss wrote in prison before his execution in 1947. It won the 2024 Academy Awards for Best International Feature and Best Sound.

It shows an artist choosing not to depict the victims' experience directly. That forces the question of whether the audience gains a better appreciation of the human experience of the Holocaust through absence and the perpetrators' ordinary lives than through a historian's account of events.

Claim and counter-claim

Perspectives (whose experience is centred), Methods and tools (sound and omission as tools). Concepts: perspective, interpretation, values.

• What does an audience come to understand about complicity that a list of facts about Auschwitz might not convey?

• Whose experience is missing from the screen, and does that absence help or harm appreciation?

• The film relies on historical research into the Höss household. Is this art's appreciation, or history's, delivered through art?

An audience with no historical knowledge may not understand what they are hearing. The film depends on history to work.

Film students can analyse the sound design as a method of knowing. History students can compare the film with their own study of the Holocaust.

• ABC7 / AP: Oscars coverage, March 2024

• Avalon Theatre: film details, source novel and awards

The arts: literature

Originally published in Hindi as Ret Samadhi in 2018 and translated by Daisy Rockwell, the novel follows an 80-year-old woman who, after her husband's death, insists on travelling to Pakistan and confronts her unresolved teenage experiences of Partition. It won the International Booker Prize on 26 May 2022, the first book in any Indian language to do so. Its tone is playful and experimental rather than solemn.

It approaches Partition through one woman's late-life memory, comedy and wordplay, not through events and numbers. It lets you argue that art conveys how a historical trauma lives on inside a person, decades later, which a history of 1947 cannot easily show.

Claim (the artist)

Scope (what kind of knowledge fiction gives), Perspectives (gender, age, memory). Concepts: truth, perspective, culture.

• Is the appreciation it offers about 1947, or about how 1947 is remembered 70 years later? Is that a different “human experience”?

• The book is fiction. What would it mean to say it is nonetheless true?

• Does reading it in translation change what an English-reading audience can appreciate?

A reader learns little verifiable fact about Partition. The appreciation depends on already knowing the history behind it.

Strong for Hindi A or Language A students. Pair it with Example 8 or 9 for a same-event comparison.

• The Booker Prizes: 2022 winner announcement

• Publishers Weekly, May 2022

The arts: photography (and history)

On the night of 2–3 December 1984, gas leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal. Photographers Raghu Rai and Pablo Bartholomew both photographed the burial of a child killed by the gas. Bartholomew's image won World Press Photo of the Year; Rai's became the emblem of the Bhopal Medical Appeal. Sources give very different death tolls: World Press Photo cites an estimated 15,000 eventual deaths, a 2003 photo festival text cites about 7,000, and the Bhopal Medical Appeal cites 25,000.

One image of one unnamed child gave the world its appreciation of Bhopal, while the numbers remain contested decades later. It lets you ask whether a single face gives a better appreciation of human experience than uncertain statistics.

Claim and counter-claim

Scope (certainty), Methods and tools (image versus data). Concepts: evidence, certainty, truth.

• Why do three reputable sources give three different death tolls? What does that show about historical certainty?

• Does one photographed child stand for thousands, or hide their different experiences?

• Is a documentary photograph art, historical evidence, or both?

A single image can be emotionally overwhelming while explaining nothing about causes or responsibility, which history must supply.

Chemistry students can connect to methyl isocyanate; ESS students to the ongoing contamination; Global Politics students to corporate accountability.

• World Press Photo: 1985 Photo of the Year

• Bhopal Medical Appeal: Raghu Rai exhibition

• Noorderlicht Photofestival, 2003

The arts: installation and memorial

After the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas, 37 tons of surrendered weapons were melted down. Salcedo used the metal to make about 1,300 floor tiles for a space for art and memory in Bogotá. Women who survived sexual violence during the conflict hammered the metal into shape. Salcedo calls it a counter-monument: visitors walk on the weapons rather than look up at a heroic statue. Her process begins with years of research and interviews.

It shows an artist building appreciation of a war's human cost through material, participation and absence, with no names, dates or images. It also shows an artist working with historians' tools, since her practice rests on research and testimony.

Claim (the artist)

Methods and tools (material and participation as tools), Ethics (who gets to shape memory). Concepts: interpretation, power, values.

• What does standing on melted weapons let a visitor appreciate that a history of the conflict does not?

• The survivors helped make the work. Does their participation make the appreciation more authentic?

• The state commissioned it as part of the peace deal. Whose memory does it serve?

Without explanation, a visitor sees a metal floor. The work's meaning depends on knowing the history it refers to.

Visual Arts students can study it as a form; Global Politics students can link it to peace-building.

• Praemium Imperiale: Doris Salcedo profile

• ReVista (Harvard): “A Space of Art and Memory”, 2021

• MCHAP: project description

The arts and history combined: Indigenous knowledge

Anangu elders approached the National Museum of Australia and the Australian National University, seeking help to preserve the Seven Sisters songlines for future generations. The resulting exhibition, led by an Indigenous curatorium, opened in Canberra in September 2017. It uses paintings, song, dance and multimedia to carry an ancestral story across three deserts. It toured the UK, Germany, France and Finland, and was shown at the Humayun's Tomb site museum in New Delhi from November 2025 to March 2026.

In this knowledge system, paintings and songs are the historical record. The artist and the historian are the same people. It lets you argue that the title's either/or reflects one culture's way of dividing knowledge.

Challenges the title (reframe)

Perspectives (culture), Scope (what counts as history). Concepts: culture, perspective, power.

• If art is the historical record, what happens to the title's question?

• Why did the elders want a national museum involved? What does that suggest about power over knowledge?

• Can an outsider visiting the exhibition in New Delhi appreciate this experience, or only observe it?

Some songline knowledge is restricted by cultural protocol, so outsiders see only what custodians choose to share.

Students in India may have seen the New Delhi showing. Links well to the optional theme of knowledge and Indigenous societies.

• National Museum of Australia: media release, September 2017

• Kiran Nadar Museum of Art: New Delhi exhibition page

The arts and history combined: objects as records

British forces looted thousands of objects from Benin City (in present-day Nigeria) in 1897. Many are court artworks made by Edo artists, including plaques depicting life at the royal court, and they have long been studied as a record of the kingdom's past. In October 2022 the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art transferred ownership of 29 of them to Nigeria under a new ethical returns policy.

The artists who made these works were, in effect, the kingdom's recorders. For over a century, outsiders interpreted them in foreign museums. It lets you ask who has the right to turn art into history, and whose appreciation counts.

Counter-claim to history; reframe

Ethics (ownership), Perspectives (colonial versus origin community). Concepts: power, responsibility, culture.

• Were Edo artists doing a historian's job? What does that do to the title's either/or?

• How might appreciation of these works change when they are interpreted in Benin City rather than London or Washington?

• The Smithsonian now consults Nigerian professionals on its exhibition text. Why does the interpreter matter?

The topic can drift into a debate about restitution. Keep the focus on knowledge: who interprets, and how appreciation changes.

Good for History students studying colonialism, and for Visual Arts students interested in museum practice.

• Smithsonian Torch: Secretary Bunch on the return, October 2022

• Smithsonian: Benin Bronzes exhibition page

The arts and history combined: investigation

Forensic Architecture is a research agency founded in 2010 by architect Eyal Weizman at Goldsmiths, University of London. It combines architects, artists, filmmakers and lawyers. In 2016, working with Amnesty International, it reconstructed Syria's Saydnaya prison, of which no images exist, using architectural and acoustic modelling and the memories of former detainees. In 2018 the agency was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, one of the art world's top awards, while its findings were also used as evidence in courts.

The same work is shown in art galleries and used as evidence in courts. It dissolves the line between artist and historian, and shows appreciation of experience (sound, space, fear) built by rigorous method.

Reframe; claim for method

Methods and tools (modelling, testimony, sound). Concepts: evidence, justification, objectivity.

• Is this art, history, or a third thing? Does the label change how much you trust it?

• Survivors' memory of sound was used as data. How does that combine the artist's sensitivity with the historian's method?

• Why might an art prize and a court both value the same work, for different reasons?

Its focus is recent events and legal evidence, so it fits “history” in a broad sense. Say clearly how you are defining history.

Strong for Physics (acoustics), Computer Science (modelling) and Design Technology students.

• Goldsmiths: Turner Prize shortlist, 2018

• The Spaces: Saydnaya reconstruction

• Frieze: interview with Eyal Weizman, 2018

History: oral history

Butalia, a Delhi-based historian and feminist publisher, spent about a decade interviewing more than seventy Partition survivors, alongside diaries, letters and parliamentary records. She began with her own family's divided history. The book centres women, children and marginalised people whose experiences official histories had left out. It won the Oral History Book Association Award in 2001. One chapter is titled “Facts”, in quotation marks.

It shows a historian recovering the inner, felt experience of Partition, which students often assume only art can do. It directly challenges the idea that historians give only facts and numbers.

Claim (the historian)

Methods and tools (oral testimony), Perspectives (gender, positionality). Concepts: evidence, perspective, truth.

• Why might a historian put the word “Facts” in quotation marks? What does that suggest about historical certainty?

• Butalia's own family history shaped her research. Is that bias, or a source of insight?

• How does she check memories that are fifty years old? Compare with how a novelist uses memory (Example 2).

Oral testimony is shaped by memory, trauma and the interviewer. Butalia herself discusses this, which you can use for evaluation.

Excellent for History students and for students with family memories of Partition (see section 17 for how to use these responsibly).

• Duke University Press edition: description and chapter list

• Podcast interview with Urvashi Butalia, January 2026

History: crowd-sourced oral history

Physicist Guneeta Singh Bhalla was moved by the oral testimony archive at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and began recording Partition witnesses. She founded the 1947 Partition Archive in 2011 and trained ordinary volunteers to record interviews. It had collected more than 12,000 video testimonies by 2025.

It shows history being produced by non-historians, at huge scale, with the aim of preserving individual experience before the last witnesses die. It raises whether breadth of many voices gives a better appreciation than the depth of one artist's vision.

Claim (the historian); reframe

Methods and tools (crowd-sourcing), Perspectives (whose voices are recorded). Concepts: evidence, perspective, justification.

• Is 12,000 testimonies a better appreciation of Partition than one great novel? What does scale add, and what does it lose?

• Volunteers, not professional historians, record the interviews. Does that change how reliable the knowledge is?

• The project was inspired by Hiroshima. What does that suggest about how knowledge methods travel between cultures?

No archive can include everyone; those who died, or chose silence, are missing.

Students can explore the archive's online stories. Pairs strongly with Examples 2 and 8 on the same event.

• University of Oxford: seminar with Guneeta Singh Bhalla, 2023

• Open Magazine: “A History of Healing”

• Overview and collection size (check figures against the archive's own site)

History and the arts together

On 31 May and 1 June 1921, a white mob destroyed Greenwood, a prosperous Black district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. For decades the event was largely absent from public memory and schools. An Oklahoma state commission's report in 2001 estimated 100 to 300 deaths and more than 1,200 homes destroyed. In October 2019, HBO's Watchmen opened with a recreation of the massacre, drawing on journalist Tim Madigan's history The Burning (2001), and brought it to a mass audience.

The historians did the work of recovering what happened; the artist made millions of people appreciate it. It shows the two roles depending on each other, and lets you ask which one produced the “better” appreciation.

Both, and the dependence between them

Perspectives (suppressed memory), Ethics (responsibility to victims). Concepts: power, evidence, responsibility.

• Would the TV drama have been possible without the historical research? Would the research have reached the public without the drama?

• The massacre was suppressed, not forgotten by accident. How does power shape which experiences we can appreciate?

• The drama is set in an alternate-history superhero world. Does that fictional frame weaken or strengthen its truth about 1921?

Measuring “awareness” is hard; media claims that most Americans had not heard of the massacre should be treated with care.

History students studying civil rights will find this useful; Film students can analyse the opening sequence.

• TheWrap: how Watchmen raised awareness, 2021

• Oklahoma Gazette: the 2001 commission figures

• MinnPost via Rural MN: Tim Madigan and The Burning

The arts: film, and its audiences

Christopher Nolan's film about the physicist who led the Manhattan Project opened in Japan on 29 March 2024, eight months after its US release. Nolan chose not to show the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the ground. In Hiroshima, an 82-year-old resident wished the devastation had been shown even for a second, while a 19-year-old student found the indirect approach more striking. A former Hiroshima mayor said the horror was not sufficiently depicted.

The same work gave very different appreciations to different audiences. It tests the word “we” in the title and shows how an artist's choice of perspective can leave out the people who lived the experience most directly.

Counter-claim (the artist)

Perspectives (national and generational), Ethics (omission). Concepts: perspective, values, interpretation.

• Whose human experience does the film appreciate: Oppenheimer's or the victims'? Is that a flaw or a legitimate artistic choice?

• Why might a young viewer and an older survivor respond differently? What does that say about “we”?

• Compare with The Zone of Interest (Example 1), which also avoids showing victims. Why might one omission be praised and the other criticised?

The film never claimed to tell the victims' story. Be fair to the artist's stated focus before criticising it.

Physics students can connect to the science; students with family in Japan may have their own perspective.

• Hiroshima Peace Media Center: audience reactions, March 2024

• NPR via Michigan Public, March 2024

The arts: television drama

Netflix's drama about Queen Elizabeth II was criticised by former prime minister John Major, actor Judi Dench and royal historians for presenting invented scenes as if they were history. Dench warned that many viewers, especially overseas, might take its version of history as true. In October 2022 Netflix added a description calling it a “fictional dramatization” “inspired by real events”, having previously resisted doing so.

It shows art's power to shape how millions appreciate real people's experiences, and the risk that appreciation built on invention is mistaken for history. It supports the view that the historian's account must anchor the artist's.

Counter-claim (the artist)

Ethics (responsibility), Methods and tools (dramatic invention). Concepts: truth, responsibility, justification.

• If viewers know a scene is invented, can it still give a true appreciation of what someone experienced?

• Who should decide whether art about real people needs a label: artists, historians, governments or audiences?

• Is a disclaimer enough, or does the drama's emotional power override it?

The Crown's subject is a powerful institution, not marginalised victims, so the ethical stakes differ from Examples 1, 4 or 10.

Film and Language A students can compare how dramatic licence works in different genres.

• ET Online: Netflix adds disclaimer, October 2022

• Dawn Images: Judi Dench's letter to The Times, October 2022

Picasso's Guernica (1937)

The default arts example for war. Usually described rather than analysed.

Compare what the painting shows with what it leaves out, using a historian's account of the town's bombing.

Art Spiegelman's Maus

Very widely used for art and history.

Focus on the father's testimony: is Spiegelman acting as artist or oral historian?

Schindler's List, The Diary of Anne Frank

Standard Holocaust examples.

Use Example 1 instead, which asks sharper questions about perspective.

Wilfred Owen's war poems; All Quiet on the Western Front

Standard First World War examples from literature classes.

Only use if studied in your own Language A course, and bring in a historian's counter-view.

Manto's “Toba Tek Singh”

Widely used for Partition, including on free websites.

Pair it with Example 9 so the essay has a same-event comparison.

Hamilton, Braveheart, Titanic

Common “art gets history wrong” examples, often used superficially.

Example 12 makes the same point with a documented public debate.

1. Claim

One arguable sentence that answers the title.

In the natural sciences, group scrutiny makes knowledge more reliable than individual insight.

2. Example

A named, dated, specific case in two or three sentences.

(A named peer-review failure or success, with date and journal.)

3. Analysis

Explain how the example supports the claim. This is where most marks are.

Show which step of the group process caught (or missed) the error, and why an individual could not have.

4. Link to a knowledge question

Name the underlying question about knowledge.

What makes a method of checking claims trustworthy?

5. Evaluation

Weigh the claim against a counter-view or limitation.

But groups can share the same blind spot (a named case of consensus that was wrong).

6. Link back

Return to the title's exact words.

So groups make knowledge more reliable only when the group itself is diverse.

Introduction

150

Long definitions copied from dictionaries. Define “better” and “appreciation” in your own words, briefly.

The arts (claim and counter-claim)

550

Retelling the plot of a film or novel. Keep description to two or three sentences per example.

History (claim and counter-claim)

550

Background history the examiner already knows. Keep only what your analysis needs.

Conclusion

250

Summarising each paragraph again. Use the space for your judgement and its implications.

Buffer

100

Keep it for linking sentences. The hard limit is 1,600; examiners stop reading at that point.

Restate your criterion for “better” → say which kind of experience each role appreciates best → judge which matters more for “the human experience” → one implication.

Concede what art uniquely offers → explain why accuracy is still the foundation of appreciation → address your strongest counter-example directly → one implication.

Show the either/or breaking down in your examples → still judge which role is closer to the best appreciation → explain why the title's assumption matters → one implication.

Retelling plots and events

The IB's lower bands describe work that is “largely descriptive”.

Two or three sentences of description per example, then analysis.

“Both are important” with no judgement

The title asks which is better. Not choosing is not answering.

Make a judgement, even if it is conditional (Position A).

Treating the arts as only paintings

Narrows the area of knowledge and misses stronger examples.

Consider film, literature, photography and memorials.

Unsupported claims such as “art is emotional”

The lower bands mention “unsupported assertions”.

Every claim needs a specific example and analysis.

Forgetting “human experience”

Essays drift into “which is more accurate about events”.

Keep asking: accurate about what it was like, or about what happened?

Token counter-claims

A one-line counter-claim does not show evaluation.

Give counter-claims their own example and analysis.

Quotations doing the arguing

A famous quote is not a reason.

Use quotes rarely; they count towards the 1,600 words.

☐ My introduction defines “better” and “appreciation” in my own words.

Sustained focus on the title

☐ Every body paragraph ends by linking back to the title's exact words.

Sustained focus on the title

☐ I analyse both the arts and history, in roughly equal depth.

Linked effectively to areas of knowledge

☐ I compare the two areas of knowledge directly in the body, not only in the conclusion.

Linked effectively to areas of knowledge

☐ Each argument has a named, dated, specific example.

Effectively supported by specific examples

☐ I spend more words analysing examples than describing them.

Arguments clear, coherent

☐ Each counter-claim has its own example and is taken seriously.

Evaluation of different points of view

☐ I say why one view is stronger in a given case, not just that views differ.

Evaluation of different points of view

☐ At least one implication of my argument is developed.

Implications of arguments are considered

☐ I have used TOK concepts to sharpen arguments, not as decoration.

Insightful

☐ The title is copied exactly, with no changes.

IB rule: modified titles lose relevance

☐ The essay is no more than 1,600 words, and all sources are cited.

IB rules on word count and acknowledgement

Two candidate titles, with two possible examples for each.

Which title lets me build the strongest argument with the examples I understand best?

Your thesis position, two claims, two counter-claims, chosen examples, and the knowledge questions you will use.

Is my criterion for “better” clear? Are my counter-claims strong enough?

Your full draft, within the word limit, with sources cited.

Where is my analysis thinnest? Is my evaluation convincing?

Understanding something and recognising its significance or value. Wider than knowing facts about it.

A contestable question about knowledge itself, such as how it is produced or justified, rather than about a subject's content.

The position from which a knower sees something, shaped by culture, experience, role and values.

History built from recorded interviews with people who lived through events.

A source created at or close to the time, or by a direct witness.

A memorial designed to resist the triumphant style of traditional monuments, often through absence or participation.

How a researcher's own identity and background shape their research.

A witness's account of what they experienced.

How an artwork or history depicts people and events, including what it chooses to show and omit.

Returning objects to the community or country they were taken from.

International Baccalaureate Organization. (2020). Theory of knowledge guide (first assessment 2022). IBO.

Official IB document; access through your school.

ABC7 / Associated Press. (2024, March 11). “The Zone of Interest” wins Oscars for best international film, best sound. abc7.com

News report; reliable for facts about awards.

The Booker Prizes. (2022, May 26). The 2022 International Booker Prize winners announced. thebookerprizes.com

Official prize body.

World Press Photo. (1985). Pablo Bartholomew, World Press Photo of the Year. worldpressphoto.org

Official archive; its death-toll estimate is one of several.

Bhopal Medical Appeal. Raghu Rai photography exhibition. bhopal.org

Campaigning charity; note its advocacy role.

Praemium Imperiale. Doris Salcedo, laureate profile. praemiumimperiale.org

Official award body.

ReVista, Harvard University. (2021). A space of art and memory. revista.drclas.harvard.edu

Academic magazine.

National Museum of Australia. (2017, September 14). Songlines exhibition opens in Canberra. nma.gov.au

Official museum release.

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters (New Delhi). archive.knma.in

Official museum page.

Smithsonian Institution. (2022, October). Benin bronzes returned to Nigeria. torch.si.edu

Official institutional statement.

Goldsmiths, University of London. (2018). Forensic Architecture shortlisted for Turner Prize. gold.ac.uk

University news; the agency's home institution.

Frieze. (2018). Interview with Eyal Weizman. frieze.com

Art magazine interview.

Butalia, U. (1998). The other side of silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Viking Penguin India. Edition details: woodslane.com.au

Scholarly book; read at least one chapter.

University of Oxford. (2023). Documenting oral histories of Partition (seminar). politics.ox.ac.uk

University event page.

Open Magazine. A history of healing. openthemagazine.com

Indian news magazine.

TheWrap. (2021). How “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country” raised awareness of the Tulsa Race Massacre. thewrap.com

Entertainment news; check claims about awareness.

Oklahoma Gazette. (2019). Commission figures on the 1921 massacre. okgazette.com

Local newspaper citing the 2001 state report.

Hiroshima Peace Media Center. (2024, March 30). Hiroshima audience of movie “Oppenheimer”. hiroshimapeacemedia.jp

Newspaper in Hiroshima; valuable local perspective.

Michigan Public / NPR. (2024, March 29). “Oppenheimer” finally premieres in Japan. michiganpublic.org

Public radio report.

ET Online. (2022). Netflix adds “fictional dramatization” disclaimer to The Crown. etonline.com

Entertainment news.

Dawn Images. (2022, October 21). Judi Dench says The Crown uses “crude sensationalism”. images.dawn.com

News report of a published letter.