Deborah Loewenberg Ball has been appointed the Jessie Jean Storey-Fry Distinguished University Professor in recognition of her exceptional scholarly achievements and significant teaching contributions. Established in 1947, Distinguished University Professorships are one of the most prestigious honors conferred by the University of Michigan upon a member of its faculty. The Regents established the professorships to recognize senior faculty with exceptional scholarly and/or creative achievements, national and international reputations for academic excellence, and superior records of teaching, mentoring, and service.
In their recommendation to the Board of Regents, Michael J. Solomon, dean of the Horace H. Rackham Graduate School and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, and Laurie K. McCauley, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, highlighted Loewenberg Ball’s scholarly contributions:
Professor Loewenberg Ball is a pathbreaking researcher in the field of education, whose work is grounded in the study of practice. 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.” Her Elementary Mathematics Laboratory is the site of a summer math class for children that for more than 20 years has been a context for educators, mathematicians, policymakers, and the public to observe and discuss the complexity of teaching and learning. Grounding her research in the practice of teaching, 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 foundational knowledge in the field of mathematics education. Her 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 classroom activity.
With this professorship, Loewenberg Ball honors Dr. Jessie Jean Storey-Fry, who served as Deborah’s school principal at Spartan Village Elementary School for more than a decade when she first became an elementary teacher. Dr. 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. Upon her retirement, 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. Dr. Storey-Fry remains active in community service to youth, education, and missionary work in her church.
Loewenberg Ball says she is honored for her new professorship to carry the name of one of her earliest and most influential mentors. “I benefited greatly from Dr. Storey-Fry’s kind but firm leadership. The things she taught me 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 me not only as an elementary teacher but also as a scholar, researcher, and teacher educator. The mentorship she provided as well as the leadership she exemplified have been foundational to all I have done.”