Many literacy teachers are creating contexts for students to learn and use a range of reading comprehension strategies. As useful as reading strategy instruction is, relatively little has been documented on the ways in which reading strategies can become tools for critical literacy. In this paper, the author illustrates how a reading strategy can become a tool for critical literacy, focusing on the specific strategy of visualizing. Drawing on data collected from a yearlong qualitative study of three after-school book clubs for adolescent girls, the author discusses how adolescents visualize texts and what happens when they share their visualizations. In sharing their visualizations, the adolescents were sharing how they "see" people and the world, and why they see that way. The author argues for a different kind of reading instruction, one in which reading strategies are seen as resources to be used for exploring written texts and texts of students' lives. (Contains 1 table.)