Faculty Fellow

Biography

Dr. Andrew O. del Calvo is an Assistant Professor of Urban Teacher Education at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. His work explores justice-oriented social studies teacher education and asset-based approaches to civic literacy teaching and learning, with a particular focus on writing in secondary social studies classrooms.

Dr. del Calvo’s scholarship seeks to create a bridge between social studies learning and students’ lived experiences and identities. He builds this bridge by co-designing and investigating learning experiences for teachers and students, using an interdisciplinary approach that draws on literature from teacher education, history education, literacy studies, sociolinguistics, and critical social justice studies in education. His research program is oriented around three main questions: 1) How do early-career social studies teachers develop as practitioners of culturally sustaining writing instruction?; 2) How can youth voices be integrated into teacher education to support novice social studies teachers in learning to enact justice-oriented instruction?; and 3) How can social studies teachers support students in writing civically engaged histories that connect the past, present, and self?

Previously, Dr. del Calvo was a high school social studies teacher in New York City public schools. His experiences as a classroom teacher continue to inform his research program and his focus on supporting teachers in realizing their own visions for justice-oriented social studies teaching.

Fellowship Project

American democracy depends on public schools producing citizens who deliberate about the public good. Rising illiberalism and censorial initiatives have greatly complicated this aim, especially for social studies, the school subject most closely tied to doing the critical work of schools for supporting democracy. Nonetheless, our current sociopolitical reality is evidence enough for how social studies has fallen short of its democratic imperative.   One potentially generative angle for meeting social studies’ democratic imperative is integrating civic deliberation—where students weigh competing perspectives about critical democratic questions and problem solve for how they should be addressed—across all content areas (e.g., history, civics, economics etc.). This integration is not trivial; it requires significant instructional shifts from transmissive pedagogies (e.g., lecture and textbook reading), which dominate social studies classrooms, to dialogic pedagogies (e.g., discussion), which are painfully absent.  

This project aims to support high school students and in-service teachers from Rutgers GSE’s Community School Partnership Network (CSPN), along with pre-service teachers from the GSE’s teacher education program, in bringing civic deliberations across social studies content areas. To do this, it employs principles of Youth Participatory Teacher Education (YPTE) and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), to support differently positioned stakeholders (i.e., pre-service/ in-service teachers and students) in co-investigating how to center civic deliberations across social studies content areas. Working together in a weeklong summer institute, followed by continued professional learning, stakeholders will explore civic deliberations through practice, dynamically rehearsing instructional strategies, while also investigating how to build classrooms that are authentic democratic spaces.