This paper is the preliminary result of a study in education that was conceived and conducted by four researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds (social studies in education, applied linguistics & communication, art education). The specific aim of the study was to develop a common ground in order to build a collective framework for literacy teaching and learning, relying on the importance of images. Based on different multimodal ensembles (Domingo, Jewitt & Kress, 2015) that were part of what these researchers called cultural inquiries, these multiple case studies (N = 10 classes from France and Quebec) show how cultural knowledge, teaching practices, and learning strategies work together when there is an explicit and collective task of processing historical visual data. In the end, cultural inquiries enhance image reading and, moreover, cleverly support visual literacy teaching.