Improving educational systems is a socially and technically complex process, involving many diverse stakeholders and complex cultural patterns of change and stasis. Educational research, in this context, has broadly been critiqued in terms of how research insights are translated into real-world practice. Educational design research (McKenney & Reeves 2018, Mintrop 2020) can be described as one response to these critiques. Within this expansive tradition, concepts such as Networked Improvement Communities (NICs, Bryk et al. 2015, LeMahieu et. al 2017), and Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships (RPPs, Penuel 2019) have emerged to suggest the need for networked co-design of innovations with school stakeholders as a driver of effective implementation, evaluation, and improvement. In this context, a core commitment across this work has been to engage a robust diversity of stakeholders, including scientists, teachers, and students themselves, not simply as participants, but as co-designers of our educational design concept. 

Supporting educational communities in networked co-design is not a simple task, especially in the uncharted landscape of interdisciplinary evolution education. Therefore, a central aim of educational systems improvement in this space must be on creating infrastructure (i.e. infrastructuring; Penuel 2019), or creating the tools, resources, processes, institutions, technologies, knowledge, and skills to drive effective implementation, evaluation, and improvement of targeted innovations. In this context, the extensive conceptual clarification, education design concept development, and digital design-based research infrastructure that have emerged within the development of OpenEvo, all represent a central commitment toward capacity building through infrastructuring activities. 

Finally, infrastructuring for networked co-design is likely to be important for the sustainability of any given educational improvement project (Penuel 2019), critically however, sustaining improvement efforts may have scientific merit beyond the valued improvements themselves. 

As co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Richard McElreath (2018), describes:

“Human societies display long-form adaptation. Humans adapt behaviorally, and human behavior requires years to acquire and generations to develop. Long-form behavioral adaptations explain our species’ extraordinary diversity and its ecological success. At the same time, the cognitive mechanisms and population dynamics that make longform adaptation possible also make possible evolutionarily novel societies and forms of behavior and technology. Humans have coexisted with these evolutionary novelties for long enough that our genes are adapted to them.

The study of long-form adaptation will benefit from long-form research that is both longitudinal and comparative, allowing it to inform theories of human evolution and the dynamics of human societies. Normal human science lacks the necessary infrastructure.” 

McElreath is framing this concept of long-form research in the context of the foundational scientific aims of his own field of human behavioral ecology, yet the implications for applied educational design research are at least as significant. Educational design is a model long-form adaptive cultural trait, or at least, that is what societies often seem to (implicitly) hope for. The variability of the adaptive value of education, however that may be defined for any given individual or community, is the central outcome that networked improvement approaches to educational design research seek to address over time. That is, for schooling to be considered adaptive for cultural groups (or the planet as a whole), schools definitionally need to consider the nested scales in space and time at which human adaptations are evolving, from within individuals in the immediate moment (sensu Wilson & Hayes 2018; Atkins et al 2019), to the evolving institutions that shape and sustain valued innovations across school systems over generations. Our Educational Design Concept further opens a landscape of questions about the role of student conceptual understanding (sensu Stern et al 2021) of human behavior in the dynamics underpinning such long-form adaptations.