In Spring 2015, I taught a general education seminar on data visualization at UCLA.
The syllabus is available here. Many of the listed readings were bound into a course reader, available for purchase at the UCLA bookstore during the term the course was held.
Readings include selections from Nathan Yau's books Visualize This and Data Points, William Cleveland's The Elements of Graphing Data, and Leland Wilkinson's The Grammar of Graphics.
During the course, we read the texts and used them to critique data visualizations we found "in the wild," including in newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals. The course was open to any student at UCLA (no prerequisities), and enrolled 15 students majoring in everything from art to math. We had rich discussions about what makes a data graphic "good" or "bad" and how to trust what we read in visualizations.