This paper reports on a study that investigates how visual representations support students’ learning in the context of socio-scientific issues (SSI). SSI often require students to apply science knowledge in order to deal with conflicts of interest. An aspect of SSI teaching and learning that is commonly held to be important is argumentation, where claims are supported with evidence. However, almost no studies have been carried out that focus on the use of evidence afforded by visual representations. In Norway, there is currently a conflict between the government and non-governmental organisations regarding whether Norwegian off-shore oil exploration should be extended or not. Two recent chronicles – one from each part in the conflict, made the starting point for the educational setting from which our data was collected. Groups of students wrote texts arguing either for or against further exploration. A range of visual representations related to the topic had been collected by the teacher and the researchers. The students made a selection from this collection and incorporated the selected representations into their texts. Video data was collected using head-mounted cameras. Analysis suggests that student learning is enhanced when they get opportunities to create, critique and revise their representations and texts. Such opportunities were therefore included in the design for learning. Our analyses reveal processes involved when the students selected and orchestrated multimodal representations into their argumentative texts. However, an implication from our study is that students appear to be more familiar with the create phase, than with the critique and revise phases. These results suggest that students need more instructional support in, and practice of, these phases.