Insight on Demand: Teaching Social Science Using Heat-Thinking Analysis of Visual Imagery

Visual studies within the various social sciences is a subdiscipline that is growing and striving for mainstream acceptance, and many sociology, anthropology, and history departments, among others, are only just beginning to add related classes to their course catalogs. In this article we contribute to the understanding of visual studies by describing a visual pedagogy we developed and utilized in a Sociology of Film course. To this end, the paper has two main sections. In the first, we outline a technique called Heartthinking (HT) for analyzing visual art that enables students to see abstract, social structural content such as the representation and meaning of social organization and processes. In the second section, we use the same HT schema to present an overall framework for a course in visual studies that achieves student-centered learning. We conclude by noting that the way in which HT addresses problems teaching visual studies is not unique to the classroom, but rather is applicable to fundamental questions about the nature of observation at the heart of methodological disputes in the social sciences.