Today's students are more comfortable with and skilled at discovering and developing information in a different verbal and visual text than that commonly found in the classroom dominated by written texts and conversation. This gap between the verbal and visual environments has implications for the teaching of reasoning skills: literacy in one means of communication does not assure or automatically encourage literacy in another; and understanding how reasoning occurs in any domain of life can be used as the basis for developing abilities for thinking critically in other domains, such as the verbal language that predominates in the classroom. A case can be made for expanding the assumed parameters of reasoning beyond the domain of reading, writing, and speaking, which rely primarily upon sight and sound, to performance, which relies primarily upon muscular and sensorimotor experiences--kinesthesia. An ability to reason in speech, print, or television is best developed from a basis that students already possess: performative reasoning. To develop this ability, teachers must recognize kinesthesia as the ground of cognition; they must also recognize that televisual communication stimulates the product of that reasoning independently of the process of its production. The implication for teaching is that encouraging kinesthetic activity which develops performative reasoning is the first step toward thinking critically across the media. (IAH)