Sister Bede Sullivan: Pioneer of Visual Literacy

 

 

I have a deep concern for those killed off in third grade by teachers caught in the conventional patterns of the linear age. The old structure of schools is deadening, destructive. Kids are alive when they come to school; too often we kill them. Now I=m trying to get them to be live kids who can think and feel, and be honest about what they think and feel. TV is where the action is and they know it. School should help them learn what that action is about.

 

          (Sister Bede Sullivan, quoted in Fowler, 1968, p. 25).

 

 

A curious thing about Sister Bede Sullivan[1] is that there is so little in the visual literacy literature about her. There are some brief mentions of her in the literature that outlines the history of the field (e.g., Debes, 1978), but one must go off the beaten path to find out about her and the contributions she made to the field of visual literacy. One primary source of information about her is an archive at the Benedictine monastery, Mount Saint Scholastica,[2] in Atchison, Kansas, which, among other things, contains several boxes of material related to Sister Bede.[3]  The search for information about her turned up a book she wrote about teaching film appreciation at the high school level (Sullivan, 1967), several articles by her and about her, and the fact that she was a student of Marshall McLuhan=s. It was also possible to identify several nuns at Mount Saint Scholastica  who knew her.  The nuns were able to locate a couple of her former students in the Kansas City area who, in turn, were able to pinpoint several more of Sister Bede=s former students scattered around the country. So far, all of the above people were more than willing to talk about Sister Bede.

This paper is a distillation of the archival material and personal interviews.  The evidence shows that Sister Bede Sullivan was many things: a survivor, a writer, a teacher and curriculum innovator, a film critic, a founding member of the International Visual Literacy Association and one of its organizers, a television producer, and a student of the media.  She was there at the beginning of the modern-day visual literacy movement in the United States. She was a pioneer in the study of visual literacy.

Before her, Earl C. Kelley=s (1947) book, Education for What is Real, was put forth as an early exposition on visual literacy and education. In it, he explored the implications of seeing and interpreting as based on motives, purposes, and experiences of the viewer.  Other ground breaking efforts included Colin Turbayne=s (1962), The Myth of Metaphor, and the National Council of Teachers of English=s (1965) book, The Motion Picture and the Teaching of English.  AIt was the British who apparently were the first to believe that the systematic offering of film making opportunities to the young might be an important part of an educational experience@ (Debes, 1978, p. 4). Coming from England, Tony Hodgkinson began a program in the Boston area that taught film making at the college and high school levels.  Similar programs were quick to follow.  As a pioneer in this area, it is thought that Sullivan was the first to regularly teach a course in film making in 1963 and 1964 (Debes, 1978, p.4). Programs like hers were developing at this time due to the accumulating evidence that television and film were affecting (infecting?) children. With the idea that the motion picture was a kind of visual novel, many of these early programs were in English departments.  Outside of the academic context, Jack Debes and a group of 4-H leaders skilled in photojournalism and visual communication developed a program called A4-H Photography@ in 1961.  Full-fledged by 1964, it became the largest program of photographic instruction in the world (Debes, 1978, p. 5). 

Much had been fermenting in the visual arts and art history before a substantive link to educational processes was made. Rudolf Arnheim=s (1954) Art and Visual Perception is a classic in the field of visual perception that takes a Gestalt theoretical perspective to visual thinking (also see Arnheim, 1957).  Before him, Gyorgy Kepes (1944) wrote the Language of Vision to Ademonstrate just how the optical revolutionBaround 1910Bformed our present-day conception of space and the visual approach to reality@ (Giedion, in Kepes, 1944, p.7). Katherine Kuh=s (1951), Art Has Many Faces proposed to Aexplain art in terms of art@ (Kuh, 1951, p. xi). Words took a secondary role to images.  Kuh=s work may arguably be the closest of these early works to look at images beyond the idea of pictorial language.  She saw words as ambiguous and flawed when trying to describe images.  She has an innate understanding that pictures Awork@ differently from verbal linguistics.  Much early work in the area of visual communication and visual literacy, however, attempted to draw correlations between verbal language and visual language.  Sister Bede=s understanding of the way pictures worked very much fit within this paradigm.

First published in 1982, Instructional Media and the New Technologies of Instruction reported that Aan exemplary visual literacy education program was developed at an elementary school in a Midwestern state@ (Heinich, et al., 1989, p. 71):

By using visual materials themselves, the children manipulate colors, shapes, symbols, and spatial relationships.  They developed perceptual skills and expressive abilities.  Practice in drawing inferences from pictorial sequences leads to better critical viewing skills: distinguishing fantasy, persuasion, and propaganda from fact (Heinich, et al., 1989, p. 71).[4]

 

A year earlier, the National Endowment for the Humanities issued a report, Humanities in America (Cheney, 1988). In that report was a section entitled, AWord and Image.@ It consisted of statistics about the astounding number of hours Americans spend watching television and noted that Aour common culture seems increasingly a product of what we watch rather than what we read@ (Cheney, 1988, p. 17).  It also posited that images Acompose a medium quite distinct from print, one that communicates differently, one that achieves excellence differently@ (p. 20).  It also acknowledges the potential of television and visual media for the literacy movement and latent savior of Western culture.

Much of this work and more has led to a realization of the central importance of the visual image. Mitchell (1994) calls this realization Athe pictorial turn.@ A Aturn@ or Ashift@ is described as Aa development that has complex resonances in other disciplines in the human sciences@ (p. 11).[5]

What these shifts in intellectual and academic discourse have to do with each other, much less with everyday life and ordinary language is not especially self-evident. But it does seem clear that another in what philosophers talk about is happening, and that once again a complexly related transformation is occurring in other disciplines of human sciences and in the sphere of public culture. I want to call this shift Athe pictorial turn.@ (Mitchell, 1994, p. 11).

 

As part of a global and radical change in the way we communicate, visual images now affect a wider range of people than any previous mode of communication. As an essential part of a current media revolution and an information explosion, visual images have a profound impact on individual thoughts and feelings, cultural learning, social constructs and interactions at all levels. Sister Bede and others were, early on, tuned into this shift in academic pedagogical discourse.  They were not only thinking about it, but were applying it in creative curricular ways. As she said in an interview for a newspaper article, AWe=re getting to the point where it is more important to learn how to shoot 50 feet of film than write a 50-word paragraph . . .@ (ANun-Expert on Films Tells How She Does It, 1967, unpaged archival copy).

 

A Brief Overview of Sister Bede=s Life

She was born Mary Margaret Sullivan in Effingham, Kansas to John Edward Sullivan and Mary Elizabeth (Majerus) on January 28, 1915.  Not even out of high school, she professed her temporary vows as a Benedictine Nun at Mount St. Scholastica, Atchison, Kansas in 1934. She taught first grade at St. Mary=s in Walsenburg, Colorado and lived in daily close contact with two nuns who died of tuberculosis. It wasn=t long before she contracted the disease.

For a good portion of her young adult life, Bede was sick and literally bedridden for years with tuberculosis.  She contracted the disease before antibiotics and vaccines were known and procedures like pneumothorax treatments were used which, basically collapsed the infected lung.  She wasn=t expected to live and had,[6] essentially, one good lung for most of her adult life. The effect this had on the way she approached things like teaching was evident: Ashe was very productive and careful of her time and energy . . . when she walked she always looks like she was walking against the wind, which she probably was because she had just one lung@ (Knightly, personal interview, February, 2001).[7]

In the early 1960s she was awarded a Wall Street Journal scholarship to attend the journalism program at the University of Notre Dame because of the quality of the student newspaper she supervised at Antonito High School. She was permitted to accept the scholarship.[8] She was an extraordinary writer and became very good friends with the head of the English Department, Edward Fischer. According to Sister DeMonteford Knightly (2001) this was Atypical Bede. She=d go to the top and didn=t mind working with the man who was in charge . . .@ (personal interview,2001).  Fischer was, incidently, interested in movies, and, in fact, wrote a book called Screen Arts: A Guide to Film and Television Appreciation, (Fischer, 1960).  Of course, Bede picked up on this interest.

Her concern with visual communication may, however, have been cultivated some time before meeting Fischer.  Her nearly life-long fascination with the Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton and his autobiographical book, The Seven Storey Mountain, might have been at the root of her visual interest.  Raised in an artistic family environment, Merton himself was interested in the visual arts.[9] His writing has a clean, unencumbered visuality to it, without decorative language and superfluous comment. For example he writes:

Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches along the river Marne. (Merton, 1948, p. 3).

 

or,

There were many ruined monasteries in those mountains. My mind goes back with great reverence to the thought of those clean, ancient stone cloisters, those low and mighty rounded arches hewn and set in place by monks who have perhaps prayed me where I now am. (Merton, 1948, p. 6)

 

One gets a clear, though faintly sketched mental image from passages such as these. Whether or not Merton=s writing had an effect on Sister Bede=s interest in visual communication is speculative at best.  But what is known is that she often used Merton=s (1948) book in the classroom. AShe was very, very interested in Thomas Merton.  She had all her students read The Seven Storey Mountain, she just did a lot with that@ (Knightly, personal interview, February, 2001).  Later she would attempt to write a screenplay about his life for Hallmark Presents.[10] She also named her Canadian residence, AMerton House.@

There is some speculation that, if she had been born a generation later she might not have gone into the monastery.  The educational opportunities for women were few and the monastic life was one way to obtain more educational advantages. A[H]ad Bede been a generation younger, I=m not sure she would still have been in the church.  It=s very difficult sometimes for people to understand the extent to which so many options were not open to women in areas of education in her generation . . . .@ (Cardarella, personal interview, June, 2003). The result, however, was that children who went to a Catholic school in those days benefitted by having some extraordinary nuns for teachers.

Teacher as Curriculum Innovator

Coming out of an English studies background, Sister Bede was aware early on of the significant influence of visual media and the need for education in this area.  In her book, Movies: Universal Language, she states, AThe fact that the projected image is the dominant communication medium of contemporary culture and a most influential one for the current generation of students is quite well established. Father John Culkin, in his Harvard doctoral thesis, points out that the average high school graduate today has watched more than 15,000 hours of televison and more than 500 films, as contrasted with 10,800 hours spent in formal classroom study. Father Anthony Schillaci, film scholar at Rosary College, sets the ratio of student use of films and books at 7 to 1" (Sullivan, 1967, p. xi).

She also writes, AIt does not require a turbaned swami with a crystal ball to foresee that the future of general education lies in TV. . . .  it behooves educators to use communications satellites to maintain a comprehensive view of society=s one-world-town; and to use local TV to establish a comprehensive view of the communityBinstant communityBview for the mobile masses@ (ABede=s Periscope,@ pp. 1-2).  Sullivan believed in a comprehensive education, rather than specialization.

As one can probably tell, she was influenced greatly by the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. She studied with McLuhan at the University of Toronto and adopted much of his philosophical outlook.  Other influences on her were Neil Postman (Postman and Weingartner, 1969), a design professor at Notre Dame, Ed Fischer (Fischer, 1960) (who Sullivan called Athe world=s most inspirational teacher@ [from Fowler, 1968, p. 22]), and Buckminster Fuller.[11]  She points to Teaching as a Subversive Activity as a guide for curriculum design for adolescent=s use of TV.  This curriculum would include:

1) community planning and action programs including newsletters, magazines, and films.

2) programs to serve the community for a range of immediate daily problems including repair of household appliances and equipment.

3) cultural programs including student-produced music, dramatic programing, films, TV programs, etc.

4) athletic programs in conjunction with the cultural services (for possible programming material?Bmine)

5) programs for city agencies including hospitals, police, fire, sanitation, parks, museums, etc., with possible extension into private business.

Sister Bede had some radical ideas for educational change. She projected that in the future there would be no need for compulsory attendance or degree seeking, but for the mean time, they are necessary aspects of an educational program. She often surprised people with her thoughts about the positive influence of film and television declaring that Afew movies are really harmful to teenagers. >I figure that most of these kids probably won=t see anything they haven=t seen in real life. But they should get a chance to discuss with us what they see, which is one reason for teaching movies=@ (Fowler, 1968, p. 21).  Some of her philosophy was applied to develop a program in film appreciation and film making at Lillis High School in Kansas City, Missouri.

The Lillis High School Program. The program she started at Lillis High School was a school-wide agenda in visual literacy. Sister DeMontford Knightly described it this way:

Every Monday morning we had a full-length movie for the entire school and it was to be used by the English teachers, by the religion teachers, [and other classes] throughout the week. [The movies] would have something that was common to all the students that they could talk about and write about. . . like, Citizen Kane and Taste of Honey, and La Dolce Vita.  It was really high-powered stuff.  Every movie was to teach something, either close-ups, long shots, or dialogue, or . . . and at the same time she established film making with her students because she said, you=d be surprised how many of them have an 8mm at home in their bedroom and so it was. So they dug up a lot of ideas and she was very creative at teaching, very creative, totally unconventional@ (personal interview, February 13, 2002).

 

The entire student body of about 600 students would watch the movie and the rest of the week=s course schedule and activity was roughly based on various aspects of the movie. Such innovation takes a great deal of trust and support from the administration , faculty, and students.  She asked for and received a great deal of both. 

The curricular design is similar to the pragmatic pedagogy of John Dewey:

One of Dewey=s curricular obsessions . . . was cooking.  The children cooked and served lunch once a week. The philosophic rationale is obvious enough: preparing a meal (as opposed to, say, memorizing the multiplication table) is a goal-directed activity, it is a social activity, and it is an activity continuous with life outside school. But Dewey incorporated into the practical business of making lunch: arithmetic (weighing and measuring ingredients, with instruments the children made themselves), chemistry and physics (observing the process of combustion), biology (diet and digestion), geography (exploring the natural environments of the plants and animals), and so on. Cooking became the basis for most of the science taught in the school. (Menand, 2001, p. 323).

 

And so it was with Sullivan=s moviesBthey formed the basis for much of the curricular activities in the rest of the school. Even today, this sort of curricular innovation is used at some of the best high schools in the nation. In Newsweek=s report on AAmerica=s Best High Schools,@ (June 2, 2003), one finds that such topics as debate, African-American culture, and music used in similar ways to Dewey=s cooking and Sullivan=s movies to orient an entire school=s curriculum (Mathews, 2003, p. 54).

Sullivan=s English class turned into a movie-making enterprise and one of the first (if not the first visual literacy courses in an American high school.  It started as a way to interest students in literature, but turned into a pragmatic way for students to understand the visual media.  They first learned the techniques of film making, made a film, then watched and critiqued itBa media production sequence on a shoe-string budget.  (She eventually received some grant money to expand her programmatic work in visual literacy).

In 1969 she presented some of her ideas about film in the classroom at a Visual Literacy Conference.  She writes, ATeachers more concerned with persons than with things are generally also more concerned with processes than with products. With that attitude, I find it is not hard to have film production in my classroom. All I provide is interestBnot cameras, not film, not even much instruction. Just interest. This creates a climate for creativity. At appropriate times we screen the films, and comment. . . . Film making opportunity shows concern for today=s youngsters who are a new breed . . . they like their communication to be multi-media, total bombardment, and fast. They like ideas, presented in picturesBthe counterparts of consonant for articulation in a verbal communication; and they like the mood created by musicBthe counterpart of vowels in verbal communication. . . . And they like it relevant. What isn=t meaningful right here and now, you can skip, because who knows if any of us are going to have a tomorrow. . .@ (undated manuscript).  She goes on to make some comparisons between media and raises movies above them all, AAlthough television is really the medium of the age, motion pictures are necessary to growth. . . . [M]ovies are to television what books and magazines were to daily newspaper of an earlier age. That is, they give depth, meaning, perspective, and some degree of permanence to the daily happenings that television reports.@  She goes on to extol the virtues of film, AFilm is both environment and art. Capable youngsters sure of their own identity have mastered film both as environment and as art. That larger group of adolescents, still groping toward their identity need some help in both areas. They need to understand film so as to avoid being exploited by those who have mastered it. And they need some help in reading the language of film so they decide whether it is (in a specific case) a comment on life, or an escape from it. A valid comment on life enhances and enriches it; a foolish comment degrades life while it arranges for ignoble escape.

Exercises in art judgement and design judgement, with focus on unity, variety, harmony, and balance introduce students to patterns of judgement that carry over effectively to filmsBeither viewed or createdB, and to oral and written composition in the verbal medium.@ (undated manuscript).

In 1965 Sullivan wrote an article for The English Journal, AMaking Movies in High School,@ which reports her first attempt at introducing film appreciation into an honors-level English high school course.  The text she used as a basis for the curriculum was Edward Fischer=s (1960) Screen Arts.  She describes her Aplay-it-by-ear@ approach in the first semester teaching it. The course started out as a fairly typical approach to English literature with the study of modern drama in anticipation of an extra-curricular production of a play.  An early injection of movie watching was used to enhance the students= approach to dramatic presentation and criticism of aesthetic design and how one medium (film) influences another, theatrical (live) plays. She writes, Afilms on Macbeth . . . and Hamlet . . . demonstrate that there is a rightness about an art piece conceived and executed in the same medium, and that an almost inescapable dichotomy results from mixing media@ (p. 433).

Before Sullivan embarked on the portion of the class in which the students made a film, parents were brought in to discuss this highly unusual way to teach students English. She reports, AGood Night, Socrates, a highly symbolic film made by students of cinematography at Northwestern University . . . was shown to a parent-teacher group, and analyzed for the group by a dozen students in a discussion led by the instructor. . . . That the students, after seven Mondays of film study, could penetrate the film knowingly with artistic awareness and thus see in the film much that others who merely looked at it missed, convinced the parents that film study ought to be part of the high school English program to enable students to communicate in the medium@ (p. 434).  The parents were also instrumental in terms of acquiring the needed equipment for film making (8mm film cameras and editing equipment).

The remainder of the article explains the making of the student film and how the project Abecame the source and setting for other English assignments@ (p. 434) including written assignments and oral presentations. In the course of more tradition high school English curricula, the study of film also generated the comparative study of epics such as Beowulf and Paradise Lost, emphasizing the Ainfluence of existing culture on subject matter and, more importantly, on the manner of expression@ (p. 434). This included a discussion of how language has been used through the ages Auntil radio forced a return to the short, colorful words of Anglo-Saxon origin, and TV ushered in the neo-hieroglyphic age of picture writing with its complicated visual grammar@ (p. 435). 

In the end, Ano one associated with the movie-making project at Lillis High SchoolBstudents, instructor, administrators, parentsBwants to return to the pre-movie stagnation of the English program@ (p. 435).  Interestingly, her conclusion draws broad and commercial justification for teaching movies in school, AMovies are obviously the inevitable mode of communication for current and future generations. As such they are obvious investment insurance for motion picture exhibitors and advertising firms. Heightened appreciation of the movies as an art form is the best security theater owners and advertising men can have that they will get their share of the $21 billion dollars teenagers will reportedly spend in 1970. Whether or not the vested interests in the commercial world recognize this fact to the point of wishing to endow teachers and/or schools in cash programs of movie-making-for-greater-appreciation is a question yet to be investigated@ (p. 435).

It seems that ultimately, her experience at Lillis High School culminated in a philosophy, however idealistic, of the nature, or potential of visual images. She came to believe that pictures form a complex language, in fact a sort of Auniversal language@ that can bridge not only time and space, but people and culture (see for example Sullivan, 1967, 1968). The naivete of this idea is probably more apparent today than ever before with images seemingly creating more confusion across cultures than not, but at the time she was writing, the hope that image-making media might bring people together was still fresh and alive.  Remember too, that it is around this time the Marshall McLuhan was formulating his ideas of the media their effect in shaping a global village.

 

The Marshall McLuhan Connection

McLuhan had been influential in Sister Bede=s writings for some time, but in 1969 she received a grant to study with McLuhan at the University of Toronto.  The year-long seminar turned into a life-long relationship with the media guru.  She became good friends with McLuhan and his family and often invited him to speak at Canadian communication and visual literacy conferences.  While in Canada, she taught visual literacy at the University of Victoria and at Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology.

McLuhan=s influence can be seen in Sister Bede=s later interest in cable television. AShe sees the medium being used at the grass roots level in working out the democratic process. Sister Sullivan stresses >getting the whole picture of oneself and of locating our own position in time and space . . . =@ (Reid, 1975, unpaged archival copy).  The path to achieving this goal, she says, is paved with an understanding of international news and the problems of information overload.

In these ideas we see echos of McLuhan=s concerns that television might be used for revolutionary (political) causes (McLuhan, 1964) and the shrinking of the world society to a global village through the use of television.

The most important concept McLuhan taught Sister Bede was that of the Figure/Ground Relationship (Nevitt & McLuhan, 1994). In a 1988 interview she reported that,

At seminars, his normal procedure was to read the front page of a newspaper for the news story of the day about an event anywhere in the world, and to start the dialogue with: AThis is the way the newsmen think the world is today.@ (This is the Figure) AWhat=s behind that? (What is the Ground?) It is not possible to understand any word or Afigure@ alone, but only in it=s context or Aground.@ The most important thing Marshall taught me was this Figure/Ground Relationship. (From Nevitt & McLuhan, 1994, pp. 171-172).

 

The figure/ground concept was also the topic of a television Aconversation@ Sister Bede took part in on Victoria, British Columbia=s Channel 10.  The show marked the occasion of his birthday anniversary.  At on point in the conversation, Sister Bede said, AWhat impressed itself indelibly on my mind was his statement: >Unless you see both Figure and Ground simultaneously, you don=t have the whole picture=@ (in Nevitt & McLuhan, 1994, p. 170).

During her years in British Columbia and under the influence of McLuhan, she became interested in the visual symbolism of the Rubik=s Cube. She did several lectures on ALife and the Rubik=s Cube@ and wrote at least two papers on the topic: AThe Rubik Cube: A Post Nuclear Symbol,@ and AThe Rubik Cube as World Symbol.@[12] Her critical analysis of this 1980s fad is an extension of McLuhan=s figure/ground concept. She writes:

Marshall McLuhan=s one-liner (AThe medium is the message@) encapsulates a whole philosophy. Expanded into, AWholeness of vision demands understanding of figure-ground relationships,@ it explains his mode of operation. This is particularly helpful in comprehending fads as an index to whatever particular Aground@ gave rise to their emergence. (Sullivan, The Rubik Cube as World Symbol, unpaged, paragraph 1). 

 

At a time when Reaganomics, MX missiles, cruise missile testing, and peace negotiation walkouts created heightened awareness of the possibility of nuclear annihilation, Rubik=s Cube stood as a symbol for the planet Earth that people unconsciously wanted so that they could cuddle it, manipulate it, and protect it in their own hands. It was game whose ultimate goal was harmony among the colored cubes. It took persistence and lacked competitiveness.  In essence, Sister Bede argued that the cube emerged as Afigure@ against the Aground@ of world conflict.

 

Conclusions

Sister Bede=s life was dedicated to God and education in the visual arts. The people I have spoken with remember her for her energy, kindness, patience, and determination. She was always for the underdog and Acould spot a student and just bring them right up@ (Knightly, personal interview, 2003). She was a superb analyst of films and had an enormous amount of cinematic knowledge.  Some might consider her an early-day ASister Wendy of the movies.@ Some just considered her Aone of the finest people they ever knew@ (Fowler, 2003, personal communication). The IVLA newsletter, postmarked May, 1978 had a column entitled, AJack in the Pulpit,@ written by Jack Debes, himself a visual literacy pioneer. He writes:

Visual literacy is so recent a concept that we can still know and learn from our pioneers. . . .  Take Sister Bede, for instance: . . . Sister Bede has paved her path with AFirsts@! - - - and to our good fortune, many of them are in the realm of visual literacy . . . .  way back [in the >60s] Sr. Bede was setting up in Lillis High School in Kansas City the very first high school film course ever to run under the aegis of a U.S.A. high school English literature program, school-wide. No small scale experimenter, Bede! 600 students, grades 9 through 12 studied, discussed and wrote about 18 films through a whole semester. The cost, she dutifully reported, was $1.50 per student.

. . . In 1967, two years before the first national Conference on Visual Literacy, Fides Press published her book about courses at Lillis. Called AMovies: Universal Language@, it is a good enough book to have been reprinted in paper recently. Because it is so practical about what might actually be done in the classroom, it is still selling.

Needless to say, the visual literacy movement found Sr. Bede fermenting in its midst. [O]perating from a base in Toronto, where she studied with Marshall McLuhan, she observed the pattern of our national conferences and decided things needed shaking or shaping up. The result was her chairmanship of our first international conference (Sixth-1974). It was mobilized by Sr. Bede and organized around the principle that a truly visual city such as Toronto deserved to be the SUBJECT of a visual literacy conference as well as merely the site.  It was surely a mobile feast. We conventioners bused, subwayed and footed our ways from space centers and studios to cable TV stations and museums. It was in many ways our most memorable conference. We celebrated Toronto, ourselves, visual literacy, and Sr. Bede!

Sr. Bede has put her mark firmly on this organization. As president, she demanded we change from a haphazard crowd of conventioners to a group with a firm membership, a continuity of action, and the structure we now use. That we survive and grow is due in part to Sr. Bede=s insistent sense of order.

Behind all this, behind those bright eyes is a deep humanity, a profound commitment to democratic society and then, a big plusBher sense of fun.

. . . From her new base in Vancouver, B.C. Sr. Bede grows new visual literacy programs, and prepares a visualized history of our movement. That production which she threatens to call AVisual Splits and Splices@ is promised for the Tenth International Conference in Rochester in November.

 

Later in her career she was often denied positions of leadership within the field visual literacy education or similar communication areas.  In a communique to her superiors entitled, ACommunications and Community Life,@ (Sullivan, 1976), Sister Bede describes several attempts throughout her later career to secure positions in the communication field, all of which were ignored or denied: a teaching position at Mount Saint Scholastica College in 1966, at Benedictine College in 1972, and as Communications Coordinator for the Archdiocese of Kansas City in 1976.  All of these applications were made in an attempt to return to the cenobitic life of her motherhouse at Mount Saint Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas.  And so, she ended her career as an instructor of visual literacy in Canada. She eventually returned to the place she started at the Mount Saint Scholastica monastery where she lived the rest of her life and died, a victim of Alzheimer=s disease.

In the end, Sister Bede never received her due recognition as a pioneer in the visual literacy movement as the field took shape in its early days.  As Sister DeMonteford Knightly told me, AI don=t think she realized the importance of what she was doing@ (personal interview, 2001). And neither did anyone else.  If this paper does anything remedy this and more deeply carve her niche in the history of the visual literacy field, then it has done its job.

 

References

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Arnheim, R. (1957). Film as art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

 

Cheney, L.V., (1988). Humanities in America: A report to the president, the Congress, and the American people. Washington, DC: National endowment for the Humanities.

 

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Mathews, J. (2003, June 2). Daring to be different. Newsweek, 141, 54.

McArthur, T. (Ed.). (1992).  The Oxford companion to the English language. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

Menand, L. (2001). The metaphysical club: A story of ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

Merton, T. (1948). The seven storey mountain. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994). Picture theory: essays on verbal and visual representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

National Council of Teachers of English (1965).  The motion picture and the teaching of English. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

 

Nevitt, B., & McLuhan, M. (1994). Who was Marshall McLuhan? Exploring a mosaic of impressions. Toronto: Stoddart.

 

Nun-expert on films tells how she does it. (1967, September 29). The Eastern Kansas Register.

 

Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. New York: Delacorte Press.

 

Schuster, M.F. (1963). The meaning of the mountain. Baltimore: Helicon.

 

Sullivan, B. (1965). Making movies in high school. The English Journal, 54, 433-435.

 

Sullivan, B. (1967). Movies: Universal language, film study in high school. Notre Dame, IN: Fides Publishers.

 

Sullivan, B. (1976). Communications and community life. (Unpublished manuscript: Mount Saint Scholastica, Atchison, Kansas).

 

Turbayne, C.M. (1962).  The myth of metaphor.  Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

 

 

Appendix

Biographical highlights of Sister Bede=s life:

January 28, 1915 B Born, Mary Margaret Sullivan in Effingham, Kansas to John Edward Sullivan and Mary Elizabeth (Majerus)

1934 B Professed (Temporary Vows) as a Benedictine Nun at Mount St. Scholastica, Atchison, Kansas. Taught 1st grade at St. Mary=s in Walsenburg, Colorado. Lived in daily close contact with two nuns who died of tuberculosis during the year.

1935-36 B Taught grades 1-3 at Holy Trinity, Lenexa, KS.

1936-40 B Student nun at Mount Saint Scholastica College. Removed from class in journalism for the reason that she Amight be contaminated, or lose faith in the study of the Spanish Civil War.@ Perpetual vow made August 15, 1937. Suffered from constant pleurisy 1938-40; had x-rays, but was told that the doctor lost them.

1940 B A.B. Degree in English, Mount St. Scholastica College.  Taught high school in Antonito, Colorado. Was denied food and medical care when she reported hemorrhaging from lungsBlater reported to have advanced tuberculosis.

1941-42 B Infirmary, Walsenburg, CO.

1942-44 B Glockner-Penrose Sanatorium, Colorado Springs. Pneumothorax treatment every 5-7 days. November, 1943 B emergency surgery, abdominal, not expected to live.

1944-45 B Saint Francis Sanatorium, Denver, CO.  Pneumothorax treatments every 10 days.

1945-47 B Saint Cajetan=s, Denver. Spent most of each day in bed. Taught 8th grade spelling 20 minutes a day. Published Dove Flights and several articles and short stories.

1947-49 B Saint Mary=s, Walsenberg. Limited high school teaching.

1949-53 B Returned to Antonito. Limited high school teaching. Directed some 4-H clubs.

1953-54 B Atkinson, Nebraska. Almost full teaching load, but bed rest after school.

1954-57 B Beatrice, NE. Full teaching load plus extracurriculars: newspaper and year book.

1957-58 B Saint Peter and Paul, Seneca. Full teaching load plus yearbook.

1958-60 B Salisbury, MO. Full teaching load plus library.

1960-62 B Antonito High School. Full teaching load, plus newspaper. Awarded Wall Street Journal scholarship to Notre Dame because of student newspaper quality. Permitted to accept scholarship.

1962-64 B Capulin, CO. Full teaching load. Novel writing on weekends. Writing prof. at ND suggested publication . . . received permission to submit it . . . but later permission was recalled after publisher had the manuscript.

1964-68 B Lillis High School, Kansas City, MO. Initiated film study as part of English program. Lectured widely.

1965 B M.A. Degree in Communications, University of Notre Dame.

1966 B Summer, M.S.S.C. Film Institute

1967-68  B Summer, Creighton Summer Institute.

1968-74 B University of Toronto and Seneca Community College, Toronto.

1972 B Summer, Rockhurst Summer Institute; Student at Benedictine Spirituality Institute.

1974 B January, Heart condition necessitating sick leave.

1974-76 B University of Victoria, part-time lecturer.

July 9, 1993 B Died

 

Relevant Vita Items:

Teaching Experience

University of Victoria, Educational Media, 1974-76

 Visual Literacy, 1975

Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology, Willowdale, Ontario, 1971-74

Federally-Funded Summer Institutes:

Film Appreciation, 1966

Film Education, 1970

Week-long Institutes in Film Education, funded by the Missouri Council on the Arts, 1966-68

Institutes in Visual Literacy, 1971, 72, 73, 75

 

Administrative Experience

 

Chair, 1974 Conference on Visual Literacy, ASENSORY CITY,@ Toronto, May 2-5, 1974.

 

Program Chair, AIntegrity in Communication,@ Canadian Speech Association Convention, Toronto, 1973 (Apparently this spun off a series of television shows that included interviews with S.I. Hayakawa, Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Johnson, and others).

 

Assistant Chair, Media Workshop, National Council YMCA, Geneva Park, Ontario, 1970.

 

Director, U.S. Arts Council Institutes, 1966-68.

 

Organizational Leadership

 

President, Conference on Visual Literacy, 1973-74.

Member, Board of Directors, Conference on Visual Literacy, 1969-75.

Member, Board of Directors, Ontario Film Association, 1971-72.

Secretary, Film Committee, 1966-69.

Member , Film Committee, National Council of Teachers of English, 1967-69.

Member, Film Committee, National Catholic Theatre Conference, 1966-68.

 

Membership

 

International Visual Literacy Association, 1966-Life (there=s some inconsistency in the date she notes as her first year as a member of IVLA and the date on the IVLA website as the starting date of the organization of 1968.  In any case she was probably one of the charter members of the group).

 

Publications

 

AOpen access to education via the mass media,@ Monday Morning, November, 1971, pp. 9-10.

 

Movies: Universal Language: Film Study in High School, 1967. Notre Dame, IN: Fides Publishers.

 

AMovies: Universal need in a TV world,@ AAUW Journal, 61(3), March, 1968, pp. 105-9.

 

AAdvances in audio visual education,@ Catholic Educator, 38(6), February, 1968, p. 84.

 

AFilm appreciation,@ Missouri English Bulletin, 24(2), March, 1967, pp. 6-11.

 

AFilm and the humanities,@ Drama Critique, 9(1), Winter, 1966, pp. 15-19.

 

AHeadstart in film appreciation,@ Film Heritage, 1(2), Winter, 1965-66, pp. 28-33.

 

AMaking movies in high school,@ English Journal, May, 1965, pp. 433-35.

 

AMovie making in high school,@ Scholastic Teacher, 87(8), November 4, 1965, pp. 13-14.

 

AWhat every high school English teacher should know about using films in the classroom,@ Scholastic Teacher, 87(2), September 23, 1965, pp. 43-44.

 

Presentations and Other Works

 

ADeveloping a media council,@ Speech delivered to Visual Literacy Conference, Nashville, 1976.

 

ADesigning a course in visual literacy,@ Speech delivered to AMTEC, 75, Calgary and to the Visual Literacy Conference, Portland, 1975.

 

AWhat cable TV is all about both sides of the border,@ A study comparing the state of CATV in the USA and Canada, no date provided.

 

AAn American in Canada prepares to look at mass media in the Caribbean,@ A study prepared for a graduate course in comparative studies, March, 1973.

 

AClosing the gap to open access,@ Speech delivered to the Conference on Visual Literacy, Boston, March 3, 1973.

 

AHandbook for cable TV,@ A compilation of bibliographies on CATV, listing for the first time much that is available in Canada, about Canadian CATV, July, 1973.

 

AHuman values in a changing Kansas,@ Cable program outlines submitted to Kansas Committee for the Humanities, July, 1972.

 

ACanadian film studies: The Seneca Program in The Real Thing,@ Vol. 2, No. 1, March, 1972.

 

Unpublished Research

 

AThe disappearance of the third person plural, the role of television in the shift to participatory democracy,@ under the direction of Marshall McLuhan at the Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto.

 

AThe role of cable television in community development,@ for Fred Rainsberry, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

 

Television Programs

 

AWhat=s my angle?@ A 13-week series with representatives of the Volunteer Bureau of Victoria, at Cable 10, 1975.

 

AA new look at education,@ A 14-week series on alternate modes of education, Cable 10, Victoria, 1975.

 

AThe church in the electronic age,@ A five-day series for the CBC, Calgary, 1975.

 

AIntegrity in communication,@ A 13-week series with interviews with major figures on the continent, OECA, Toronto, 1973.

 

ACanada Plus,@ A six-week series on Canadian filmmakers, Newmarket Cable, Ontario, 1972.

 

AThe artist at worship,@ A four-week series at KCMO-TV, Kansas City, 1966.

 

AThomas Merton: Jester in search of a king,@ a television 90-minute special (in progress at the time of her writing).

 

References include Marshall McLuhan.


[1]Up until the time of Vatican II, it was not uncommon for a Catholic nun to take a male saint=s name upon her vows, as Sister Bede (pronounced Ab‘d@) did. Saint Bede, also known as ABede the Venerable,@ and the AFather of English History,@ was born in 672 at Wearmouth, England. He was known as the most learned man of his day and wrote and taught on such topics as history, rhetoric, mathematics, music, astronomy, philosophy and more. His writings started the idea of dating this era from the incarnation of Christ. Our knowledge of England before the 8th century is mainly the result of his writing. (see http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/saintb10.htm, in addition, there are several websites with information about Saint Bede and books about him as well).

[2]An early history of monastery from its beginning through about the early 1960s can be found in Sister Mary Faith Schuster=s (1963) book, The Meaning of the Mountain, which may only be available through contacting the library at Mount Saint Scholastica.

[3]Many thanks to Sister Marie Louise Kenner for her help in locating and organizing Sister Bede=s archival material. The archive itself is quite an extraordinary place as is the entire monastery.  Thanks to all of the sisters and their hospitality.  My stay with them was a time I will not forget.

[4]Ewald=s (1985) visual work with grade-school children is also an important cite to mention.

[5]McArthur (1992) identifies four communicative shifts. Little is known about the first shift: the development of speech in the Homo sapiens sapiens subspecie, but there is some speculation that it occurred somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago.  The creation of writing is the second major communicative shift occurring about 5,500 years ago. It is associated with the development of various writing surfaces and the creation of an alphabet (subshifts within this shift). The third shift is the development of printing and moveable type which occurred about 500 years ago. The fourth shift, which is currently ongoing, is centered on electronic communication. It began about 50 years ago.  The pictorial turn, that Mitchell describes, is part and parcel of the fourth shift, although there are some distance reverberations of the pictorial turn in the philosophical writings of Pierce and Wittgenstein.

[6]Sister DeMonteford Knightly tells this story: Awhen she was very sick in Colorado in her early days . . .  they expected her to die. They had her clothes packet and everything. Sister Helen, who was her sister, was told to go out and accompany the body back [home]. So, she gets on the train and goes out to Colorado to the hospital, the deathbed of her dying sister and Bede=s just lying there with her eyes closed. So, she bends over and kissed her and Sister Bede opened her eyes and she said, Helen, what=s the news? Typical Bede@ (personal interview, February, 2001).

[7]Sister DeMonteford was, in part, recalling a quote from an article written about Sister Bede which described her as, ACompact and purposeful, she walks with a slight forward bend, as though plunging uphill against the wind. It is the proper carriage for a woman who might be called a kind of megaforce, aroused by a near-fanatical sense of mission@ (Fowler, 1968, p. 21).

[8]The monastic order strictly controls a member=s life decisions, as was the case with Sister Bede.  Basically, anything a nun may want to do must be agreed upon by the powers-that-be (The Mother Superior, various Prioresses, and sub-Prioresses, etc.).

[9]A repository of his work resides at the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University located in Louisville, Kentucky. The collection includes 800 drawings and 1100 photographs. Not all of these were produced by Merton himself, but many were.  (See http://www.merton.org/collection.htm).

[10]Hallmark Presents was a television dramatic series that presented stories especially around holidays.

[11]The link between Sister Bede and Buckminster Fuller is less clear than the others mentioned.

[12]Both of these papers were found in the archive at Mount Saint Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas. Neither one has a date, or full citation.  The latter of the two is identified as a paper for the McLuhan Colloquium and both were written while she was in Victoria, British Columbia.