Image of Learning: Peter Scott, Closure, and the Space Where Learning Happens

How stories teach children to connect ideas

“We all shape how young minds face the world they inherit from us. Every story we tell, every silence we leave, and every attitude we pass on influences tomorrow’s world.

Today, when divided thinking still endangers our shared existence, unity of thought and action – especially in how we care for our mother ‘Nature’, matters more than ever.”

When artist and educator Peter Scott M.A. joined World of Water in the early 1990s, we were already probing a question we couldn’t yet name: how do people complete what they only partly see? Peter gave that question a language and a discipline. He called it closure, borrowing from Scott McCloud’s term for the mental act of filling in the gaps (“gutters”) between comic novel images to make sense of a sequence.

Over nearly fifteen years of collaboration through the Image of Learning (IOL) project, Peter helped us explore how this simple idea could transform teaching, storytelling, and publishing.

The Value of Closure

Peter’s first major paper, The Value of Closure, examined how readers, and particularly children, connect fragments into continuous meaning. He showed that closure is not just a comic‑book phenomenon but a basic learning process. When a story leaves something unsaid – or an image incomplete, the learner instinctively fills in the gap. What they infer reveals how they see the world.

The Elements of Sequential Art

His second study, The Elements of Sequential Art, broke down the building blocks of visual storytelling: order, timing, layout, and omission. In IOL experiments with early-years learners, Peter showed that even tiny changes – a pause, a missing frame, a rearranged sequence, could alter comprehension. The way stories are structured teaches as much as their content.

The Use of Story within the Educative Process

In Peter’s third paper, The Use of Story within the Educative Process, Peter applied these concepts to classrooms. Stories were not treated as decoration but as deliberate frameworks for exploration. Visual narratives became safe spaces for children to test interpretations, negotiate meaning, and connect new ideas to lived experience. Teachers, too, became co‑learners, guiding but not closing the process.

From Research to Publishing

The IOL project gradually shaped World of Water’s broader educational ethos: that learning happens in the space between what is shown and what is understood. This insight became the foundation for our publishing arm, Little People Books, which continues to create visual stories that invite young readers to think, infer, and imagine beyond the page.

Continuing Relevance

Although Peter has since retired and the IOL archives rest quietly, their influence persists. Across disciplines – from digital storytelling at Durham University to research at Loughborough University’s storytelling academy, educators now explore the same questions Peter posed decades ago: How do stories shape our understanding? How do images guide learning?

In an age saturated with screens and symbols, Peter Scott’s gentle warning still resonates: stories and sequences are never neutral. They can teach, mislead, or open minds – depending on how we frame the gaps.

Image of Learning taught us to leave those gaps open, carefully. That’s where real learning begins.

A Message from World of Water

To all parents, carers, and teachers everywhere – thank you for being the first storytellers in every child’s life. The pauses you leave, the quiet spaces between your words and images, are not emptiness. They are invitations. In those small, respectful gaps, young minds learn to connect, question, and imagine their own answers.

As a charity devoted to nurturing understanding and stewardship of our one shared planet, World of Water believes that good quality closure matters – not just in learning, but in living together. If we can help our children grow up knowing how to see connections rather than divisions, how to complete a picture without closing it off, then they will inherit not only knowledge but wisdom.

Every small act of guidance, every open-ended story, every moment of curiosity passed between generations helps our world breathe a little easier. The better we teach closure, the less we cling to dogma. The better we frame our gaps, the more space we leave for empathy, for dialogue, for peace.

So, from all of us at World of Water:

Let’s keep the story open.

Let’s keep learning,  together,  on this extraordinary blue planet we all call home.