Figuring in the Past: Thinking about Teacher Memories. Occasional Paper No. 137.

Research on teachers and teacher thinking finds itself subject to tensions between two prevailing factions. The first sees promise of progress in the rejection of frequently conservative, idiosyncratic teachers' thoughts; the second embraces those thoughts as expressions of a sacred, lived truth. Detecting conflicting mythologies at the core of this division, the author considers several means by which teachers' memories can be persuaded to yield their fruits: the fruit of structure, which provides a way to organize and retain experiences; and the fruit of quest, which provides an impetus to examine the fruit of structure in order to extract deeper meaning from those experiences. In the process, the author makes use of literary representations and philosophical investigations, concluding that a candid evaluation of researchers' mythologies will recognize them as varieties of meaning-generating faith. (Author)