One of the best places to promote a cross-curricular dialogic rhetoric is in the first-year college writing course. Perhaps the most important part of any young person's college education, core curricula set up a value system much more relevant than many of our colleagues might believe. First-year students (or 13 th graders) are still at a very moldable stage. And, because we have the authorial title of professor attached to our presence, these children attach a great deal of faith in what we show and tell them. Thus, the way a writing class is presented, how it is taught, the reading list, the instructor's attitude, all influence a student's foundational attitude toward language, critical thinking, and rhetorical processes both inside and outside the classroom.

To promote and validate this sort of dialogic interaction, we can turn to the more productive and complex rhetorics alive in modem theory but often neglected in classroom practice, rhetorics like, Kenneth Burke's dramatism and his rhetoric of identity, Paulo Freire's conscientizacao and Edward 0 Wilson's consilience, (both of which depend upon dialogic convergence of various specialized knowledge systems) and James Berlin's social epistemic rhetoric which compels writers (and speakers) to discover meaning and knowledge as well as the means to rhetorically [re]offer this new knowledge back into the world from which it emerged. The basic components of these rhetorics all have one thing in common: the insistence that we all have the right (and duty) to maintain a voice in our own cultural/political environment, and that this right must be earned through an active involvement in our shared cultural discourse.

Maintaining and informing Burke's dramatistic rhetoric of identity, Friere and Berlin insist that dialogue is essential to education and freedom. By emphasizing cultural experience as text, students can become visible participants in the cultural and political forces that might otherwise control them. The sort of critical thinking required of this sort of education can best occur in the English writing/reading classroom where culture and personal experience can come to terms through honest, critical dialogue and the enabling rhetorical and stylistic strategies that will help students to add their voice to Kenneth Burke's "never ending conversation."