Balancing Literacies

I'm interested in Selfe's concept of "visual literacy," but most of all, I'm interested in learning more about the balance we should strike between the alphabetic and the visual.  If Selfe visualizes that classes teaching only alphabetic literacy are quickly becoming obsolete, then does that leave any room for it in the classroom today?  If Selfe envisions a world in which composition teachers make room for both alphabetic and visual literacies, then slowly weans away the alphabetic because it's increasingly out of vogue, surely that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy (as it likely already is): the less alphabetic literacy is taught and internalized among students, the less successfully it will be used out in the real world.

After all, didn't we read all about how high schools are increasingly inadequate in teaching alphabetic literacy skills to their students, so more and more these remedial skillsets are falling on universities to teach?  To me, since I certainly can't yell at the high schools and tell them to shape up, I've taken this as a call to arms.  These students will come to my class with precious little previous experience, and I will want to give them at least the most basic means of expressing themselves in words.  I'm not sure if this is a shortcoming of mine, but I can't picture a society (outside of, perhaps, dystopian ones like from Wall-E or Idiocracy) where we express ourselves solely in visuals.

I think, ultimately, I'm questioning Selfe's prognosis that a class emphasizing alphabetic literacy would truly become "obsolete."  I'm all for incorporating visual literacy in the classroom.  I was convinced by Selfe's talk about the importance of visuals in today's culture, and I don't doubt that my students will have even better, more creative ideas about how to do this than I do myself.  I am growing a little weary, however, of the sensed need for iconoclasm in the world of composition; just because you advocate incorporating a new system, that doesn't automatically indicate that there are no salvagable concepts in the old.  If Selfe really wants to argue that the tenets of alphabetic literacy are "obsolete" in meeting the needs of expression, then why would she have expressed herself so alphabetically?  Clearly there is still some value in it, and I, for one, hope to give my students at least the foundation of alphabetic literacy that Cynthia Selfe and I (and the rest of you) received.