Kathleen Rucker

This month’s installment of our Community Spotlight series features the principal of Brooklyn International High School (BIHS), Kathleen Rucker. Kathleen started at BIHS as a science teacher 19 years ago, and has spent the last seven years as principal.

Much like Beam, BIHS is community-oriented and sees everyone - students, teachers, staff - as community members who have a say in things that happen at the school. Students are regularly engaged in conversations with school staff and members of the DOE, discussing changes that need to be made, what types of teachers need to be hired, and more. Kathleen believes that as a principal her role is more “to facilitate the brilliance of everyone else in this community” than to dictate its development.

Kathleen also said that her personal philosophy is to push back against how schools traditionally function, “to push back against the dominant narrative.” Part of this work at BIHS is the school’s long standing partnership with Beam Center. BIHS was first introduced to Beam through an incubator program more than ten years ago.

According to Kathleen, Beam has transformed the teaching approach by teachers and school administrators at BIHS. When asked what learning in the classroom looked like before their partnership with Beam, she said “it was always paper, building models and designing on paper (more drawing based)” and that “Beam made it possible to use other materials and make things three-dimensional.”

BIHS is also the location of Beam’s first Fab Lab, created back in 2016. The Fab Lab is still used regularly by teachers and students and includes a variety of tools, such as a laser cutter, saw machines, vinyl cutter, and more.

Beam-inspired projects have become common in all disciplines at BIHS. Kathleen says that Beam changed what teachers see as possible in the classroom and provided a new approach to empathizing with their students. Teachers are asked to learn how to navigate new tools and techniques, similar in ways to their students’ experience navigating a new country and language. As Kathleen states, a Beam-inspired project helps teachers understand “what it means to be a beginner and how hard it is emotionally, and to have that persistence of managing to not give up when you feel like a failure.”

Thank you for continuing to be a part of the Beam community, Kathleen!