The March 2024 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society features a profile of Deborah Loewenberg Ball’s life and career. Written by Hyman Bass, Loewenberg Ball’s long-time colleague and collaborator, the profile is one in a series celebrating the work and careers of several accomplished women in mathematics. It features details about Loewenberg Ball’s family, education, elementary teaching career, scholarly pursuits, and key contributions, including her development of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT), her seminal insights about teaching and teacher education (e.g., high-leverage practices and discretionary spaces), and her design and leadership of the Elementary Mathematics Laboratory (EML).
In his piece, Bass summarizes Loewenberg Ball’s orientation toward the transformative power of teaching:
Teaching (and learning) for Deborah is a calling, a life practice, her way to interact with the world, to nurture and empower people of all ages, stations, and identities, and to disrupt institutions and practices that oppress them. She assumes that all children bring substantial knowledge and skills, and so considers it a core task of the teacher to elicit that and use it as a foundation for what new material the children are ready to learn.
As a mathematician himself, Bass also reflects on the ways others in his field have responded to Loewenberg Ball’s work on the teaching and learning of elementary mathematics:
Something mathematicians most appreciate about Deborah is her respect for the integrity of the disciplinary knowledge in whatever domain she teaches, mathematics in particular. Although she has followed a different path in and around mathematics, she reflects a mathematical sensibility and depth of mathematical understanding of all that she teaches, as well as an artistry in pedagogical design that elicits critical thinking and a deep engagement with learning. And she does this with children historically and pervasively marginalized and oppressed in our society.
Read the profile here.