New honorary doctor at Faculty of Educational Sciences

Gunther Kress is an internationally leading researcher in the areas of multimodality and communication. One question that permeates his writings is how communication shapes us as social individuals and social subjects. Over the past 25 years, he has studied the interplay among different forms of communication — writing, image creation, speech and music-making — and what they mean for contemporary learning and knowledge. He describes present-day changes in our ways of communicating partly as a transition from the printed page to the screen. He has written several groundbreaking works, including Reading Images: The Grammar of Graphic Design, which is the first systematically conducted study in this area. The images range from children’s drawings and toys to moving pictures, web pages and artworks. Among the communication forms studied by Kress are those in school students’ learning environments, e-learning, textbooks and medical students’ practicals.