Bringing popular culture into the composition classroom is useful not because it erases the conflict between student and academic discourses, but rather because it serves to heighten this already extant conflict, thereby allowing it to become one of the subjects of study. Writing samples by two students early in the semester and class discussion about cultural influences reveal how students initially see themselves as having the option of choosing either to accept the unified world view that the teacher offers them or to maintain their own unified world view. That the world views under consideration might be internally contradictory and conflicted or that these world views might overlap, placing both student and teacher in more than one world of discourse simultaneously, are not possibilities the students entertain until later in the course, as three additional student writing samples reveal. The goal by the end of the course is to get students to be willing and able to simultaneously value and critique themselves and the positions they maintain, even though conflicts come to light as they are asked to think in new and potentially threatening ways both about their surroundings and the role language plays in their interpretations of these surroundings. (Student writing samples are included.) (KEH)