ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the new patterns in science communication to nonspecialist audiences, more specifically those found in modern school science textbooks published in Brazil and in the UK. It also discusses the role of visual representations in learning scientific ideas. The chapter examines some examples from school science textbooks to try and understand better the role played by images. It also explores on how images work in cooperation with language, and when it can be seen as more apt than language for a given purpose. Educational research has also provided analyses of images in school science texts, which discusses their role in teaching and learning through a number of studies analyzing textbooks and classroom practice. It analyzes different representations of electric circuits, textual and visual, which are displayed in table form. The chapter identifies and documents new ways textbooks are structured and address students.
