ABSTRACT
Whilst at the Institute of Education, I had the pleasure and privilege of developing a close friendship with Gunther Kress, and together we collaborated in a number of unlikely seeming research projects bringing together ideas about communication and the teaching of science. I say unlikely, because our friendship had to bridge wide gaps in world view, with me as an unrepentant naïve scientific realist, for whom the bloody-minded intransigence of the real world is the central fact of life, and Gunther, for whom social construction is the core of everything. One product of the collaboration was the book Explaining Science in the Classroom (Ogborn, Kress, Martins, & McGillicuddy, 1996), where our two perspectives joined forces to try to describe what “explaining” science has to be, but here I want to talk about a different influence, coming from Gunther’s work with Theo van Leeuwen on visual communication (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). Leaving the Institute of Education, I became involved in the development of a new A-level Physics course sponsored by the Institute of Physics: Advancing Physics (Ogborn & Whitehouse, 2000, 2001; Lawrence & Whitehouse, 2000, 2001; Ogborn, Marshall, & Lawrence, 2008a, 2008b). Ideas about how to communicate difficult and abstract ideas as vividly as possible through various kinds of visualisation were one key to the conception of the new course.
