Teaching Pronunciation

I read an interesting blog post at Critical Mass ELT: Reflections on the World of English Language Teaching entitled It's all in the accent: Being critical how you teach pronunciation that focused on the issues that surround teaching pronunciation.  The author discussed accent prejudice and whose pronuncation students should seek to imitate.  This interests me as I have students with marked accents and some of them struggle to imitate the local regional accent.  Although I think that pronunciation is important for communication as I often have difficulty understanding students who have accents that differ from mine, I also think that accents are part of our identity.  I need to contemplate and discuss with my students the importance of pronunciation in communication but at the same time respect the fact that there are is not only one standard for pronunciation.