Reading Images for Knowledge Building: Analyzing Infographics in School Science

This book provides a new framework for analyzing images used in school science to build knowledge, focusing on their complexity, recognizability, and the relationship between appearance and reality. It is illustrated with over 100 images and will be of interest to scholars in multimodality, semiotics, literacy education, and science education.

Format: Hardback
Length: 280 pages
Publication date: 07 August 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This groundbreaking volume presents a novel analytical framework for comprehending the strategic utilization of meaning-making resources in images crafted for knowledge construction in school science. The framework empowers the examination of science images from two distinct perspectives: complexity and recognizability. Complexity delves into the technical and abstract knowledge inherent in school science, encompassing aspects such as technicality, evaluative dispositions related to that knowledge, and the condensation of technical and dispositional meanings into concise and visually impactful discipline-specific infographics known as aggregation. Recognizability, on the other hand, focuses on the interplay between the visual representation of phenomena in the real world and the reconfiguration of this reality in images. It encompasses elements such as the congruence between the depicted phenomena and their actual counterparts, the perceptibility or discernibility of the features and contexts of phenomena in images, and the engagement and connection that images establish with their viewers.

To illustrate the framework, the book includes over 100 color images in the electronic version and black and white images in the paper version. This comprehensive collection serves as a valuable resource for research into multimodal literacy pedagogy, which incorporates a deep understanding of the role of images in the teaching and learning of school science. Scholars specializing in multimodality, semiotics, literacy education, and science education will find this book particularly insightful and valuable.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367759179