Introduction With the emergence of globalisation and the knowledge economy, it has become a priority for economically advanced countries to increase and democratise the innovative capacity of their citizens. In New Zealand, there is an urgent need to develop young people’s capacity to work creatively and innovatively with knowledge (Ministry of Education, 2007). This presents a huge challenge for teachers, who will be required to shift their pedagogical beliefs and practices from supporting students to reproduce knowledge, to “actively interact with it: to understand, critique, manipulate, create, and transform it” (Bolstad & Gilbert, 2008, p. 39, emphasis in original). A knowledge building communities (KBC) model developed by Scardamalia and Bereiter (2003)