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Thanks all for sharing perspectives, conscious/unconscious/social, this morning.  A few thoughts it brought to my mind ...

Yep, it makes sense to approach all understandings, including one's own, with skepticism, rather than to "pick the summary I like, and stop there."  Life is more interesting that way.  I'll bet if we kept our eye on that ball, we'd find fewer students "turning off," and probably fewer teachers getting frustrated and bored.  By ourselves being aware of/open to alternate summaries, the classroom becomes a more interesting place for everyone, and our students become empowered as meaingful contributors to the ongoing evolution of understanding.

From this perspective, conflicts really are something to be valued rather than something to ignore/get frustrated by/solve by reaching consensus on one or another of the conflicting alternatives.  Different summaries may be useful in different contexts ("categories" can be sometimes useful, sometimes destructive) and different summaries can seed entirely new alternative understandings.

Perhaps we could come to see the conflicts between "open-ended transactional inquiry" and more traditional educational approaches as  .... the grist from which new understandings could emerge?  There must be a set of observations leading to the "baggage" students as well as others (parents, administrators, politicians) bring to the educational arena.  What new understandings might come from taking this particular conflict seriously, rather than taking it simply as a barrier or irritant in doing what we might be more inclined to do based on our own understandings?