No.  As far as we know, there isn’t one TED speaker who has, say, 5 different TED Talks.  To make a body of work, as per the definition given by the IB on page 22 of the guide, you need a group of TED Talks by the same author.  This just doesn’t exist. 

No.  Adichie is listed as an author on the PRL.  Therefore, the IB considers anything that author has written as literary.  This goes for any author who appears on the PRL including Martin Luther King Jr., Arundhati Roy, Maya Angelou, Henry David Thoreau and more. 

Yes.  However, it does depend on the length.  Dear Basketball by Glen Kene and Kobe Bryant is too just too short.  13^th by Ava Duvernay isn’t too short.  It’s a full length documentary and therefore it qualifies as a non-literary body of work.

We just don’t know the exact number.  What we do know is what the IB gives us for literary works: 15-20 poems; 5-10 short stories; 5-8 essays; and 10-15 letters.  That gives us a good range to work from, depending on the text type (one might guess that shorter text types would be on the higher end of this range and longer text types would be on the lower end of this range). 

Yes.  The company or brand would be the “authorship.”  You can even choose a variety of advertisements over time if you want.  In other words, it doesn’t have to be one Nike ad campaign.  You can teach a variety of Nike ads from different years (see the Nike commercials at the bottom of this page). 

This is also okay to do.   

It depends.  Is the author given (does a by-line exist)?  If so, every news article must come from the same writer/author.  And they must all be the same text type.  You can’t have a mix of news articles with opinion columns with interviews.  And you can’t pretend the “authorship” is The Guardian when the writer is by-lined. 

For newspapers, online or in print, “authorship” will most likely only work for editorials, which are traditionally unsigned and from the newspaper editorial team.  So, you could study a series of editorials from the New York Times.  But if you are going to study opinion columns, they must come from the same author, like Nicolas Kristof. 

Most likely, yes.  If it is the same author or group of writers and if they are all podcasts, this could potentially be used as a body of work.    

But some podcasts are actually interviews.  In this case, it’s hard to determine if a body of work can be created.  Why?  Well, they interview someone different each time (say Terry Gross from NPR).  While she is the interviewer, the interviewee changes.  Will that work for assessment purposes?  We just don’t know.    

This is a huge grey area.  The IB leaves it up to our professional judgement.  The guide, on page 22, does state that you should consider “whether the author is recognized for being a literary writer or whether the text has a clear aesthetic purpose.”

For example, Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich is a full length non-literary body of work in the eyes of the IB.  Although powerfully written and excellent non-fiction, it is not literary in terms of aesthetics.  Therefore, it qualifies as a non-literary body of work.

On the other hand, I have no problem arguing that Paul Kalanathi’s memoir When Breath Becomes Air is a literary work.  He’s not on the PRL and therefore this would be a free choice work.  Trevor Noah’s memoir Born a Crime presents more complications though.  You will need to individually decide if this is literary and is one of your six literary works at HL (and a free choice work) or if it is not literary in nature and thus a non-literary body of work.

Yes!  You can even do this in the first year of the course, if you want.  You just need to understand the implications of your decision. 

For example, if you have a great unit of study that deals with the feminist movement over time, and you want to place this unit of study under the “time and space” area of exploration, go for it!  You can have students read texts from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, excerpts from A Room of One’s Own, gendered advertisements from the 1950s and 1960s, and #MeToo speeches. 

But, you can’t use any of these for assessment purposes!  Virginia Woolf is on the PRL and so her work is literary.  Gendered advertisements come from a variety of sources/products.  The speeches are from different people and so on.  In other words, you don’t have a non-literary body of work. 

That’s okay because you have a bigger aim than assessment.   

You just need to make sure that before the Individual Oral (and the Higher Level Essay to a lesser extent), students have a variety of non-literary bodies of work they can choose from for that assessment task. 

Finally, in that unit of study, you might also choose to do a “zoom in” approach where at the end of this unit, you study the cartoons of Liza Donnelly.  Those cartoons would be a body of work (same text type by the same author not on the PRL) and could be used in the Individual Oral or the Higher Level Essay.