Moonshot Methodologies Network
Education’s hardest problems require methods as complex as the challenges themselves.
For a long time we’ve treated education as complicated, something that with enough effort we might engineer or scale our way through. Yet education is a complex, dynamic system of interwoven relationships, experiences, people, and communities. Solving education’s most challenging problems seems impossible, so it’s time to change the way we approach them.
Breakthroughs happen because fields invest in new ways of asking questions, testing ideas, learning from failure, and building actionable knowledge.
Education deserves the same.
Meet the AERDF Moonshot Methodologies Network
The AERDF Moonshot Methodologies Network (MMN) is an international, transdisciplinary community dedicated to the emergent field of cultivating, discovering, and testing methodologies and solutions to complex learning challenges.
AERDF MMN brings together researchers, practitioners, designers, scientists, innovators, public leaders, and experts from within and beyond education to build a new field of study that can accelerate breakthrough innovation.
Why does this matter?
Education’s biggest challenges aren’t static. They’re shaped by complex contexts including culture, history, technology, policy, economics, and place. Many of today’s research approaches are exceptionally good at determining whether an intervention can work under a specific condition. But they weren’t designed to answer every question education faces—like why an approach works, how it changes across contexts, or what conditions allow it to improve and spread over time.
An uncommon network
The Moonshot Methodologies Network connects people who rarely find themselves in the same room.
By design, participants come from inside and outside education. By collectively learning and integrating across methods, perspectives, and experiences, we can better understand complex challenges, work with uncertainty, generate evidence, and adapt in real time.
This sort of uncommon network creates space for uncommon conversations—where bold ideas start and leaders question assumptions together.
What will we achieve together?
The Moonshot Methodologies Network has emerged at a particularly uncertain, dynamic time.The network is working to create something education has rarely had: shared methodological infrastructure, rooted in innovation, that bridges disciplines.
Together, the MMN is strengthening three lasting foundations for breakthrough innovation:
- Demonstrating a different way forward
MMN is an experiment in how we can work differently to solve complex challenges. The network aims to demonstrate that expanding how we learn together can produce scientific insights no single field or methodology could generate alone. - Codifying the methodological toolkit
MMN employs a broad range of approaches—from systems thinking and improvement science to participatory design and rapid-cycle learning—to better understand how innovation happens in complex learning and social environments. - Building an emergent field
Breakthroughs don’t emerge from isolated projects. MMN is designed as an enduring community where ideas, methods, and collaborations can continue to evolve and a new field of study can emerge.
Together, these capabilities will create the conditions for knowledge to accumulate, so each breakthrough becomes the foundation for the next.
How does the network work?
The Moonshot Methodologies Network’s work currently takes shape in three ways:
- Transcend disciplines: The MMN is intentionally transdisciplinary and international. Participants compare their different vantage points and generate actionable knowledge together during in-person retreats.
- Explore methods, not just ideas: Drawing upon the practices of complex systems and metascience, members ask not “What should we build?” but “How can we rethink our mental models for how to understand and tackle society’s challenges?”
- Grow a new field of study: MMN aims to turn the network’s learning and insights into resources others can use, including shared language, frameworks, practical tools, and ways of working that endure beyond any convening.