Four Ways to Engage with the IB Area Of Exploration Questions

With the first two years of the new curriculum feeling totally topsy-turvy due to the pandemic, most of us did what we could to get our students through completing their Individual Oral and sitting the Paper 1. It was difficult to embrace the full scope of the course and the richness that things like the Course Concepts and Areas of Exploration offer. We tried, though! Here are a few ways I’ve used the Area of Exploration questions to ignite inquiry.  

Note: All of my examples come from a Lang and Lit class, but these activities could be done in a Literature course as well.

Spark inquiry – Create sub-questions to AOE questions based on a text or topic.  

This is a simple activity to initiate questions within an Area of Exploration about a specific text or topic. This can be a pre- or post-reading activity and can lead into larger activities or assessments (as you’ll see with following suggestions).  

The process

1. Scatter the 6 questions for one of the specific Areas of Exploration across the classroom on pieces of A3 paper (you could also do this with a digital platform like Padlet or Google Jamboard). 
2. In the style of a Chalk Talk, invite students to add a “sub-question” to each question in relation to a topic or text. Remind the students to try to keep the questions focused on the pertinent elements of the course: language, culture, literature, text types, readers, etc.
   • For example, during my “Language, Food and Culture” unit, students were asked to render the questions more specific to this topic (for instance, turning “How do texts adhere to and deviate from conventions associated with literary forms or texts types?” to “What are the conventions of a restaurant review?” or “To what extend does Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat conform to or deviate from the conventions of a cookbook?”) 
3. Compete a gallery walk so that students can read and respond to each other’s ideas.  

Empower students with inquiry– Choose, as a class, which questions you’ll focus on for a specific unit.  

At the beginning of Year 2, I saw an opportunity to expose the students to a variety of text types in service of the Paper 1 through the aforementioned “Language, Food and Culture” unit (written about here), but also thought we could anchor our study in a few AOE questions. As we had already done units in Year 1 focusing on each of the AOEs, I thought a blend could be fun, and that students themselves could decide where we take the study.  

The process

1. We started with the “Spark inquiry” activity documented above – but with all 18 questions across the three Areas of Exploration.  
2. After students had spent time writing their new questions, they also took the time to read everyone else’s in a silent Chalk Talk. 
3. Students returned to their groups of 4 where I asked them to identify the 5 AOE questions they found to spark the most interesting lines of inquiry. I asked that they choose at least one from each of the three AOEs.  
4. Each group submitted their top 5, and I returned to the students the next class with our final selection.  

Our selections 

In case you’re interested, these are the questions we landed on from the three AOEs:  

• How important is cultural or historical context to the production and reception of a text? (T&S)
• How do we approach texts from different times and cultures to our own? (T&S)
• In what ways is meaning constructed, negotiated, expressed, and interpreted? (RW&T)
• How do texts adhere to and deviate from conventions associated with literary forms or text types? (Intertextuality)
• How can texts offer multiple perspectives of a single issue, topic or theme? (Intertextuality)

How did we follow through on this?

Our unit culminated in a Socratic Seminar about food and culture, and the questions we selected were some of the points of entry for that discussion.

Document inquiry– Return to the questions periodically throughout a unit to track shifts in thinking.  

This is a great way to use your Learner Portfolios to document increasing depths of thinking over the course of a unit. This journal could be kept digitally (see included documents) or in a physical LP. The idea is to see how their answers to the AOE questions grow in nuance.

For context – I first used this with the Time and Space questions during a unit called “Confinement.” This unit was developed in response to the pandemic, and featured Sartre’s No Exit as an anchor text. In addition to this, we also read a few essays from Zadie Smith’s Intimations, engaged with some information about existentialism and theatre, and Elif Batuman’s incredible New Yorker piece about Theater of War Productions, “Can Greek Tragedy Get Us Through the Pandemic?”

The process

1. At the beginning of the unit, distribute the journal.  
2. Once a week throughout the unit, particularly after an impactful activity or reading, have the students choose one or two questions to document their new thinking.  
3. There’s space for either teacher or peer feedback – if you have extra time, students could respond to each other’s journals, making it a little more dialectical in nature.  

How did we follow through on this?

I’m not sure that we totally have; our realizations over the course of the unit certainly informed our final project, which was putting on a Zoom production of No Exit. However, I am happy with the fact that these reflections are in their Learner Portfolios and can be returned to throughout Year 2 when they need a bit of inspiration or want to appreciate how far their thinking has come.  

Assess inquiry: Turn the questions into more precise questions about a studied work or topic. These can be further negotiated into research topics for an essay.  

During the first year of the new course, my students read The Scarlet Letter. We were focusing on Time and Space as our Area of Exploration. Especially in my SL-only classes, I like to take advantage of the freedom of the new course to create assessments that are not directly tied to the formal IB assessments. I decided a research project culminating in an essay would be a fruitful task.  

Students started with the Area of Exploration questions as launching points. We completed the “Spark inquiry” activity detailed above and then students launched into a step-by-step writing process. In the conclusion of the essay, students were asked to explicitly return to their umbrella AOE question and discuss how this research illuminated something new for them in relation to it.

Examples of topics included: 

1. Exploring the presentation of public shaming in The Scarlet Letter and comparing it to Twitter shaming today (using So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson as a source)  
2. Considering the nature of historical fiction (given that the novel was written in the 1850s and takes place in the 1600s) 
3. Comparing the presentation of adultery in The Scarlet Letter and the novel a student was reading in his German A: Language and Literature class  
4. Examining the ways in which the social hierarchies in the text were reflected by characters’ dialogue and language use 

Note: I would not call these “literary essays” so much as research papers. Many of these topics would not be “literary” enough for either an English Extended Essay or an HL essay. However, this assessment was done in my SL-only Year 1 class. I used it as more of an opportunity to have students interrogate sources, become more confident with our library and their own research skills, and really dig into these Time and Space questions. The essays were finished with varying success, but the research and drafting process was certainly one that the students benefited from for the rest of their Diploma experience.  

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay