A framework for infrastructuring sustainable innovations in education

Abstract

Learning scientists have historically been interested in understanding how learning happens and in creating innovations to facilitate learning in real-world situations. Recently, the field has recognized that advancing standalone innovations is not enough to address systemic problems in education; instead, the focus must be broadened to sustain these innovations. Drawing on an interdisciplinary body of literature on infrastructure, this paper presents a framework—the IMPROV framework—that offers theoretical, methodological, and practical tools for infrastructuring innovations in the learning sciences. Infrastructuring can be defined as the ongoing process of creating functional infrastructures for activities in a particular context. I describe six inter-connected areas of infrastructuring to highlight ways that learning designers and researchers could surface existing infrastructures, facilitate coherence-making negotiation activities, engage practitioners in collaborative design, and continuously evaluate infrastructuring activities. It is hoped that such advances will increase the relevance and sustainability of innovations in education and provide infrastructure to further improve them.