Dr. Fran Arbaugh

Fran Arbaugh is professor of mathematics education and curriculum/supervision in the Penn State College of Education Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Her scholarship is in mathematics teacher education; she is driven by a passion to understand professional learning opportunities for mathematics teachers. She intentionally seeks to link research and practice, engaging in what Stokes (1997) called “use-inspired” research. She identifies problems of practice – which manifest themselves in the everyday work of teacher education and are inherently localized, contextual, and idiosyncratic – and designs research projects to develop and test possible solutions. Fran is widely published in venues intended for researchers and for practitioners, with six books and more than 50 journal articles and book chapters. She has garnered more than $3 million of external grant funding to support her scholarship.

Fran has received many awards for her teaching and research. Notedly, she was named a William T. Kemper Fellow for Teaching Excellence at the University of Missouri (MU) in 2007, receiving one of the most prestigious teaching awards at MU. In 2017, she received the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) Excellence in Scholarship in Mathematics Teacher Education award. She is a Past-President of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) and served as a Co-Editor of the Journal of Teacher Education.