Honoring a Career of Scholarship Based in Practice

Decades before Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball was the dean of U-M's School of Education or the president of the American Educational Research Association or the recipient of more than a dozen awards and honors for contributions to mathematics education, she was a teacher at Spartan Village Elementary School in East Lansing. It was there that she learned foundational lessons about teaching and leadership from her mentor, Dr. Jessie Jean Storey-Fry.

Storey-Fry served as Loewenberg Ball's school principal at Spartan Village Elementary School for more than a decade when Loewenberg Ball first became an elementary teacher. As a teacher, Loewenberg Ball benefited greatly from Storey-Fry's kind but firm leadership. The things she taught Loewenberg Ball about teaching—about its power, its imperative to leverage the assets of students and their families, and its capacity to create strong academic identities in young children—were crucial to Loewenberg Ball's development not only as an elementary teacher but also as a scholar, researcher, and teacher educator.

Storey-Fry was the first Black woman to serve as principal at Spartan Village, and went on to become the first Black woman to hold a central administrator role in East Lansing Public Schools. She had more than 40 years of teaching and administration experience in public schools, including as a principal, director of elementary education, central office administrator, and adjunct professor at Michigan State University.

This year, when U-M bestowed its highest faculty honor on Loewenberg Ball, appointing her Distinguished University Professor, she chose to recognize the principal who had shaped and inspired her.

On September 1, 2024, Loewenberg Ball was appointed the Jessie Jean Storey-Fry Distinguished University Professor of Education. The title recognizes her outstanding scholarly achievements, commitment to excellence in education for her students, and extensive contributions to the University of Michigan and beyond.

Those who read her work, collaborate with her, or participate in the learning opportunities offered by TeachingWorks, the organization she founded and directs, benefit from her unique approach to education scholarship.

Loewenberg Ball brought more than 15 years of elementary teaching experience with her into academia. After earning her PhD, she spent eight years on the faculty at Michigan State University's College of Education before joining the University of Michigan School of Education faculty in 1996. In 2000, she was named an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in recognition of her outstanding contributions to undergraduate education. In 2005, she was appointed the William H. Payne Collegiate Professor in Education and began an 11-year period as dean of the School of Education, now the Marsal Family School of Education.

Loewenberg Ball's work is grounded in the study of practice, using elementary mathematics as a critical context for investigating the challenges of helping children develop understanding and agency and how to work collectively, and on leveraging the power of teaching to disrupt patterns of injustice.

Her pioneering concept of "public teaching" created a method to expose the practice of teaching to rigorous empirical and conceptual study in pursuit of "practice-based theory." For more than 20 years, Loewenberg Ball's Elementary Mathematics Laboratory (EML) has educated children in math and served as a unique context for educators, mathematicians, policymakers, and the public to observe and discuss the complexity of teaching and learning.

She has worked with mathematicians, teachers, and mathematics educators to identify the specialized mathematical knowledge needed for teaching, and showed its relationship to and difference from disciplinary mathematical knowledge. The resulting theory of "mathematical knowledge for teaching" is now a foundational concept in the field of mathematics education.

Loewenberg Ball's research has also provided important insights into the ways that inequity and oppression regularly pervade normative teaching practice, and how teacher education and development could help disrupt this. She is currently researching the relationships among broader sociopolitical environments and the micro-dynamics of classrooms, revealing what she has termed "discretionary spaces": how teachers' everyday practices are permeated with habits of action and inaction, judgments, and decisions that shape the work of teaching and students' experience in powerful ways, positively and also harmfully.

Loewenberg Ball's commitment to "practice-based theory" means that she is quintessentially a teacher in all her work. In addition to teaching elementary children every summer at the EML, she regularly teaches teacher education courses, graduate courses in education foundations and policy, and courses for students across the university with an interest in education. In addition to the Thurnau Professorship, Loewenberg Ball also received recognition for her skillful teaching with an Excellence in Teaching Award from the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators.

Her contributions have been formally recognized by many institutions and organizations. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education, and is a fellow and past president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. She received the Felix Klein Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Mathematics Education Research from the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction—the highest honor worldwide in mathematics education; the Louise Hay Award for Outstanding Contributions to Mathematics Education from the Association of Women in Mathematics; the Edward Pomeroy Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teacher Education from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education; the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Michigan State University College of Education; and two outstanding article awards, including the Palmer O. Johnson Award from AERA. She is the most highly cited author worldwide in mathematics education research and is an author of the two most-cited articles in mathematics education.

Loewenberg Ball's service to the education field was also recognized by Teachers College, Columbia University, which awarded her its Medal for Distinguished Service. She served as President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA); Chair of the Spencer Foundation Board of Trustees; and Member of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Board of Trustees, and Chair of its Education Advisory Committee. She was twice appointed (by presidents Obama and Biden) a Member of the National Science Board; was appointed Chair of the Michigan Council for Educator Effectiveness by Governor Snyder; and was appointed a Member of the Presidential National Mathematics Advisory Panel by then-Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

All of Loewenberg Ball's career milestones and accolades grew from a deep commitment to the study of practice that was launched in her classroom at Spartan Village Elementary School. As an educator, researcher, and mentor, she continues to share her passion for the critical work of exploring teaching and learning.