Carola Suárez-Orozco

Professor and Chair

"Our book [Moving Stories: Educational Pathways of Immigrant Youth] reflects ten years of research on 400 recently arrived immigrant children, starting when they were 9-14 years old. We wanted to see how they adapted with a particular focus on how they were doing in schools."

“If you’re interested in the study of immigration,” says Carola Suárez-Orozco, “what better city is there than New York?” An internationally recognized figure in the field of immigration studies, Suárez-Orozco is Professor and Chair of Applied Psychology and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Teaching and Learning.

She is also Co-Director of Immigration Studies, a Steinhardt-wide project that looks at the way immigration is changing our country and how immigrants are changed by the processes of immigration. She and her husband, Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, brought the project from Harvard University, where they taught for many years.

Frequent collaborators, the two recently finished writing a book entitled Moving Stories: Educational Pathways of Immigrant Youth. “Our book reflects ten years of research on 400 recently arrived immigrant children, starting when they were 9-14 years old. We wanted to see how they adapted with a particular focus on how they were doing in schools.” They found that many immigrant kids started out being quite optimistic about education, only to become discouraged over time. “English language acquisition takes longer than most people think – not just one year of immersion, more like five years of high quality education. These kids need stable support networks and mentors, but a lot of them are isolated. Their families might be loving and supportive, but they often don’t have the resources to help their children in school because of their own language skills and lack of education. The quality of schools they attend also matters a great deal with regard to their motivation and success. To be effective, schools have to constantly stimulate kids’ curiosity and engage them.”

A team of graduate students worked with Suárez-Orozco in conducting the research and in some of the analyses that led to the book. “Each one concentrated on a different topic - language acquisition, or networks and relationships – and then took a lead role in analyzing those particular data.” All of these students are part of a research team she meets with every week. “The students in the department are so motivated, so smart, so curious and so dedicated to the well being of newcomer kids. They’re a joy to work with.”

They will no doubt help Suárez-Orozco with her next project, which uses the research from Moving Stories to look at a wider range of students and schools. “Immigrant kids by and large end up in schools that aren’t always of the highest quality,” she explains. “I now want to study a range of engaging environments like Stuyvesant, but also charter schools as well as traditional urban schools.”

Suárez-Orozco is also looking forward to new developments she is overseeing as department chair. “I am very excited to find myself at the helm of the department right now. We’re in the process of expanding our undergraduate program and I’m working towards getting as many of the faculty involved in teaching in it as possible. We’re also launching a new doctoral program called Psychology and Social Intervention, which has been stimulated by the recruitment of several fabulous faculty who have transferred into our department from the Faculty of Arts and Science’s Community Psychology Program. I’m also working with our faculty to create courses that cut across programs so there’s more of an extended community among the various departments in Steinhardt.”

But perhaps especially exciting for Suárez-Orozco is finding herself in a department where she feels at home. “I trained as a clinical psychologist at the California School of Professional Psychology, but there was a period in my life when I felt out of step with psychology. The field became too focused on the person, it seemed to me, and lost sight of the fact that we all operate within a greater cultural context. What I love about this department is that everyone here understands individuals within context, be it social or historical. Everyone here cares about how large issues like immigration affect people on a day-to-day basis. That makes this department intellectually and culturally savvy. I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”

Carola Suárez-Orozco's complete faculty bio.