“But what is the relationship between your senses and how do they affect the way we know?”

It was a question I found myself asking with increasing desperation. I’d been through the tried-and-tested hooks (optical illusions, wine experts being tricked by changing the labels on bottles), but these resulted in, at best, a passive interest from my students.

Even the examples of how and why some images are controversial to one culture but not others were wearing thin.

In the International Baccalaureate (IB) theory of knowledge, it is important to give students the opportunity to see how our ways of knowing work together, within different areas of knowledge, and also in relation to our personal knowledge.

It’s all very well discussing whether our senses are reliable, how they rely on each other and are linked to experience, but I needed a way for students to experience this.

Re-awakening the senses

Having asked students to declare any food allergies before the lesson, I prepared a bowl of food for each student, purposely choosing items that we don’t usually eat together: strawberries with tomato ketchup, rice and cornflakes, and soy sauce with ice cream. The possibilities are endless (foods with strong smells work well).

I put students in pairs, and got Student A to blindfold Student B. Then Student A collected a bowl of food and instructed Student B to eat the food.

After the initial excitement and, at times, screams when the “B” students first ate the unknown food, the “A” students played a vital role in getting the “B” students to understand how their senses were working in giving them knowledge, asking questions such as: 

• What are you eating? How do you know? What senses are you using to help you gain knowledge?
• How is the eating experience different without sight?
• How much experience are you using when eating unidentified food?
• Can you try and eat while blocking your nose? How does this change the experience?

While the “B” students were eating common food but in an uncommon situation, they could take time out to discuss the following questions, during and after the activity:

• How did your senses work together to make up for your loss of sight?
• What role does experience play in providing us with knowledge when we eat food? How do our senses work together to give us this experience?
• How, if at all, did the taste of the food change without the benefit of sight or knowing what you were about to eat?
• How are sight and taste linked? How do they rely on each other to provide you with knowledge?
• To what extent did the language of your partner impact your knowledge of the situation?
• To what extent is the knowledge provided by sight more powerful than the taste of the food?
• “Sight provides us with the filters we need in order to create knowledge.” Discuss this claim with reference to two areas of knowledge.

Giving the “A” students the same experience was never going to have quite the same impact, as the element of surprise had gone, so the return activity was done differently.

Switch things up

I experimented with playing music, swapping partners halfway through, inviting other teachers to join in as the new partner (did the new voice have an influence?), or giving food without any language at all. These changes helped to put the student “A” out of their comfort zone.

The impact of this activity was that students could discuss the relationship between their different senses and the impact of sight on knowledge through personal experience.

They were then in the position to respond to the different perspectives in the classroom from the standpoint of having been through the activity, taking in the notion that people with the same experiences can take different “knowledge” from it.

I now regularly use this method to introduce the senses to my students - they love this lesson and it is one they always remember at the end of the course.

Oliver Furnival is IB curriculum manager at the Anglo European School in Ingatestone, Essex

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