Valerie Miner muses in "Writing and Teaching with Class:" "I've always carried that Miner suspicion that laboring with words is not real work . . . Should I be doing something useful?" (1993, 74). If working-class academics face uneasy negotiations between their disciplines and their home cultures, which may include deployment of regional dialects and feelings of marginalization, then dominant language assertion and ideology interrogation within the writing classroom would necessarily compound this uneasiness. The divide grows as the working-class academic--particularly female Appalachians--performs her home identity in classrooms and academic departments. "Strange Imports" argues that the sometimes invisible markers of class made apparent in the composition classroom can foster an open and honest community where both student and instructor engage in a pedagogy of discovery. Conversely, the outing of this identity within academia can lead to alienation by scholar/peers who feel protective of the ideals of ivory tower politics. Through the process of metis, or purposeful shape-shifting, the female Appalachian academic performs southern mountain dialect to thus solidify her body as one located outside of the academy, a divergence that students both recognize and can relate to, but often doubt. The identity is not pastiche, but the realization of cultural boundaries moves to unite instructor and student.