Infrastructuring as a Practice of Design-Based Research for Supporting and Studying Equitable Implementation and Sustainability of Innovations

This essay presents infrastructuring as a useful construct for guiding efforts to support more equitable implementation and sustainability of resources developed to support student learning in design-based research. Infrastructuring refers to activities that aim to redesign components, relations, and routines of schools and districts that influence what takes place in classrooms. It can take place within ongoing, long-term research–practice partnerships, where teams can follow the contours of problems that arise from introducing innovations into classrooms, particularly as they relate to equity of implementation of those innovations. When we support and study infrastructuring in partnership with educators, we can create improvements to educational systems that last.