Rhetorical Curriculum 1: University System 0

1) Most Provocative Quote: "The university system is doing a good job of training a select group of students to produce persuasive visual messages. But shouldn't we be at least concerned with helping the rest of our students respond to these messages in an informed and critical way? If we can tap into the experience, expertise, and interest in visual communication that exists across campus, then we can build a new paradigm, one that takes rhetorical education seriously and that recognizes it for the multidisciplinary endeavor that it is" (Hill 129).
2) This quote is provocative to mean because it is a call to action; an action that would truly shake the university system as we know it, not just within the "English department" but campus wide.  This rhetorical curriculum Hill calls for sounds good, but I am very unsure how it could be successfully implemented. I'm wondering if there is a smaller scale change that could create a chain reaction. It is also provocative to me because it appears to claim that the university system (shockingly? no) does not serve its entire student population. Phrases like "a select group" and "be at least concerned" really connect to a emotion filled argument. I'm doubting that administrators appreciate hearing that the system they maintain does not train all students.
3) For me this quote can also be situated within the realm of the producer/consumer binary that we discussed in Convergence Culture in the spring (producer+consumer=prosumer). I see Hill's rhetorical curriculum as a space to create prosumers as opposed to the binary of producers (a select group) and consumers (the "masses"). Especially with the technological atmosphere, the importance of this rhetorical curriculum Hill calls for is going to increase. It also connects to some of the bigger issues I have experience as both a student and a faculty member at my previous institution. Learning where the boundaries existed for course offerings was eye opening, but if we approached rhetorical education as multidisciplinary, these boundaries would be less rigid and potentially create more spaces for learning, and collaborating.
4) I haven't read everyone's blogs yet... so I will probably add comments to my blog or others' as I map the connections of our discussions.