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Introduction
In their 2005 World Report entitled Towards Knowledge Societies , the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization ([62] UNESCO, 2005) outlined the current state of development in the "information age" and the growth of "knowledge societies." They noted the need for humanity to move beyond the notion of a singular "knowledge economy," which has served only to increase the knowledge gap between the Global North and the lesser-developed South through methods that limit the control of knowledge to the most powerful and wealthy. They suggest that the path to equitable development, on the other hand, is through the promotion of knowledge societies: multiple societies based on their own supply of locally valued knowledge and culture, but tied together in global networks of research, commerce, and communication. Central to this vision is the move from simple information sharing to knowledge building. In order for sustainable knowledge societies to grow and thrive, humans must have the ability to access information from which they can create knowledge as well as the capacity to share that knowledge globally with others who can build upon this new information in a "virtuous circle" of knowledge building.
If economic development and the resultant social progress are to proceed in a more equitable manner around the globe, education based upon new methods of teaching and learning will be a key factor. Progressive educators argue against instructivism, which assumes the effectiveness of passive reception of sanctioned information through memorization and recall, and instead promote the development of skills in collaboration, problem solving, knowledge creation, and evaluating gathered information ([6] Bereiter, 2002). With this end in view, many educators have turned to pedagogies based on constructivist epistemology, although the debate about the efficacy of constructivist learning models still persists ([61] Tobias and Duffy, 2009). In many lesser-developed countries, traditional instructivism continues as the norm. The students, teachers, administrators, and policy-makers in these countries react in different ways when introduced to innovative constructivist curricula. In this article, I will attempt to conceptualize the reactions to constructivist-based pedagogy in instructivist-based learning cultures by presenting a conceptual model of this process. In order to do this, I first briefly outline the differences between instructivism and constructivism, reviewing their underlying philosophy and pedagogical practices. Upon this...