Let me begin by saying that I am new to the way the academic community is using the term visual literacy. In my own mind, by creating a chapter book series that was filled with pictures, I’ve been waging a one-man crusade for visual literacy. But in the time since I’ve been on the march, which is over 15 years now, the world has kind of started catching up around me. So you’ll forgive me if I bandy the term about in non-academic ways.
Wow – what a long preamble to say that I think that kids should be reading chapter books filled with pictures. First, this is important because it will help promote regular old literacy, especially for kids who struggle to decode words (understand what they read) without the aid of pictures – and this is a huge part of the population of kids, I can tell you. But second, there should be pictures in every thing that kids read because they live in a society that is filled with images. Every other input of information they will process in their lives practically is filled with or dominated by moving or still images. And developing a skill and facility for seeing, critically analyzing, comprehending possible meanings of, and deriving appropriate meaning of the pictures in the context of the surrounding words is a tremendously important life skill.
Why would the academic community abandon the teaching of this skill. I’ve ranted (er…discussed. 
) this before as a problem related to the cost of color printing. But at this point, I would like to point out that academia favors the kids and ultimately the adults who can read without the aid of people. In fact, if you’ve ever read an academic paper, you’d swear that they get paid to fill up the paper so you can’t sneak a picture onto it. If you want an example of an academic sentence, read my last sentence in the previous paragraph. I’m not proud of it. Too long. But it’s late and I’m not going back to edit it. So I’ll use it to make my point.
So man, I’m on the march again for visual literacy. Sometimes I get a bit beaten down. People will tell me that kids don’t want pictures. They want chapter books with words only. And in my heart, I know this is only so because these kids haven’t been exposed to the right kind of books.
For this reason – I am in love with the graphic novel. These came out in the public eye, crawled out from beneath the underground counter culture rock where they’d been languishing for years in the mid 90s and filled me with hope.
So hey – maybe I’m writing graphic novels for the chapter book for kids set. What do I know – other than the fact that kids need books with pictures.