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Texas Agriculture Archive

January 17, 2003

Farm Bureau recognizes this award-winning
teacher who shares two interests with students...

Editor's Note: The following story is reprinted with permission from the Victoria Advocate.

By Marsha Moulder
Victoria Advocate

Beverly Bruns told her fifth-grade students to find the growing cycle of a plant. During a discussion about Thanksgiving with her fourth-graders, she asked why the celebration of gathering in the food was more important to the Pilgrims than it is to people today. James Thedford answered, "We go to H-E-B, and they had to plant."

And so go the lessons in Bruns' music classes at Dudley Magnet School. Bruns, who has been teaching music and reading to students in kindergarten through fifth grade at Dudley since 1996, has been in education for 30 years. Throughout her career she has made a point of including lessons about agriculture in her regular curriculum.

For instance, as a third-grade teacher at Aloe Elementary School, where she taught from 1976 to 1996, she helped develop an "outdoor" classroom on school property where students could learn about conservation measures. Bruns said she developed her interest in agriculture as a child when she lived on her great-great grandparents' ranch. Her dad would frequently tell her, "This land does not belong to us, it belongs to the future," and those words stayed with her.

"I believe those words more deeply every day, and seeing the faces of over 100 students a day has weighted a tremendous responsibility upon that belief," Bruns said.

Bruns' commitment to helping her students gain an understanding of renewable natural resources and agriculture have earned her numerous awards. In 1987, she received conservation teacher awards from several organizations on local, state and national levels. In 1997, she was recognized for 10 years of service to agriculture and education through Ag in the Classroom at the National Ag in the Classroom Conference.

Her contribution to agricultural literacy extends beyond the boundaries of her classroom, and even her campus. Bruns serves on the board of directors for both the Texas steering committee and the national steering committee for Food, Land and People, a nonprofit organization committed to helping people of all ages better understand the interrelationships among agriculture, the environment and people of the world.

Food, Land & People's science- and social sciences-based curriculum, Resources for Learning, currently serves pre-kindergarten to 12th grade students throughout the United States. The curriculum consists of 55 hands-on lessons, developed and tested by more than 1,000 educators. Nearly 12,000 teachers are currently using the lessons with 300,000 or more students.

For the past 13 years Bruns has been one of the educators helping develop materials for Food, Land & People. She is currently trying to develop a 10-acre Outdoor Agriculture Educational Center at Dudley. Once this site is developed, her goal is to promote agriculture through the study of grass identification, soil testing, wildlife observation, tree identification, wetlands area, butterfly gathering area and a math center to observe and explore the acre/hectare relationship.

She is also working with a local farmland owner to develop an agricultural education resource farm that would be linked to the Dudley ag center and the Children's Discovery Museum of Victoria. Among the goals of this project is to educate students about the wide and varied contributions of past and present African-Americans who have been a vital part of the agricultural history of Victoria County.

Her continued effort to educate students about agriculture has earned Bruns the Texas Farm Bureau's Outstanding Agriculture in the Classroom Teacher of the Year award for 2002. She received her award in December at the 69th annual Texas Farm Bureau Convention in Corpus Christi. In addition to the state award, Bruns will be nominated for the National Agriculture in the Classroom Outstanding Teacher of the Year. Five teachers from around the country will be chosen to represent their state at the National Agriculture in the Classroom Conference in Nashville, Tenn., in June.

The Texas Farm Bureau was most intrigued by Bruns' ability to use music to teach students about agriculture. Tying music and agriculture together didn't seem like such a stretch to Bruns.

"When I started teaching music I knew I had the best opportunity to expose and instill agricultural understandings to children," she said. "Through song, students are led to an understanding of the interrelationships between agriculture, the environment and the people of the world."

Bruns noted that the Texas State Essential Knowledge and Skills Domains for music include a part that says, "Historical/cultural heritage. The student related music to history, to society and to culture..."

Bruns said those criteria enable her to help students recognize their need and their role in making wise decisions concerning where their food and clothing are produced.

Bruns noted many of the songs she has her students learn have an agricultural background. These are typically folk songs. Historically, people sang in the fields and mothers sang in their homes as they prepared meals or clothing for their families, and they sang about what they experienced, what they were closest to, the earth, Bruns said. She has her students study the lyrics of the songs, which often give an agricultural reference, such as the process of production, or perhaps a poetic reference to the value of food and fiber, she added.

"I feel confident that I am not only meeting the (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Domains) of music, but I am embellishing the concepts of the earth sciences and the food needs of each student. If I stopped with just teaching the steady beat of a song, the richness of the lyrics would be lost. More importantly, students would miss out on the awareness of where their food is coming from.

"If my 500-plus students that I teach this year will leave me singing lyrics of agricultural literature, I will have made a difference," she said. "They will in part have the understanding of where their food and clothes come from. They will understand the processes of obtaining that food and clothing. They will know what this means to the economy of our country."