Rasa Žakevičiūtė
Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
E-mail: rasa.zakeviciute@jyu.fi

Joanna Kędra
Department of Language and Communication Studies
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
E-mail: joanna.kedra@jyu.fi

Visual sociology has already established its position within the social sciences. As a separate area of sociology concerned with the visual dimensions of social life, it is mostly associated with the application of visual research methods or, simply, with using visual material. Still, in most of the countries it is perceived as extraordinary or ‘elite’ kind of research. This means that even though fashionable, visual methods of enquiry are infrequently applied, mostly due to the lack of sufficient training in this area. The lack of knowledge, experience and teaching in visual research methods is contradictory to today’s daily communication practices that are predominantly visual.
Therefore, as both teachers and academics, we noticed an urgent need to familiarize students with the basics of visual research methods, while at the same time, to develop their skills in looking and seeing through more visually oriented teaching practices. In this paper, we share and reflect upon our practices and experience of teaching visual research methods courses to the international, multidisciplinary groups of university students. Through several years of teaching we observed that students are highly interested in working with visual material, but are usually left to rely on self-learned knowledge from various handbooks without critical pedagogical view or guided learning practices. With this paper, we invite the discussion on the importance of visual research methods for learning seeing in both classroom and research contexts.