In this article, we share our reflections on visualization literacy and how it might be better developed in early education. We base this on lessons we learned while studying how teachers instruct, and how members acquire basic visualization principles and skills in elementary school. We use these findings to propose directions for future research on visualization literacy.

Visualization is coming of age: with visual depictions being seamlessly integrated into documents and data visualization techniques being used to understand datasets that are ever-growing in size and complexity, the term visualization is becoming used in everyday conversations. But we are on a cusp; visualization researchers need to develop and adapt to today's new devices and tomorrows technology. Today, we are interacting with visual depictions through a mouse. Tomorrow, we will be touching, swiping, grasping, feeling, hearing, smelling and even tasting our data. The next big thing is multi-sensory visualization that goes beyond the desktop.

There is a growing demand in engineering, business, science, research, and industry for members with visual analytics expertise, but teaching visual analytics is challenging due to the multidisciplinary nature of the topic matter, the diverse backgrounds of the members, and the corresponding requirements on the instructor. We report some best practices from our experience teaching several offerings of a visual analytics graduate course at Purdue University where we leveraged these multidisciplinary challenges to our advantage instead of attempting to mitigate them.