Once upon a teacher

Irene Benedict reflects upon a lifetime devoted to learning
Meeting Irene Benedict ’58 M.A. for the first time, you quickly see that she’s a seasoned teacher.  She doesn’t rest until she’s convinced that you fully understand her answer to each of your questions.

She is a fount of information about Arizona’s statehood and how it is connected to ASU becoming a university 50 years ago. She can tell you who founded Tempe and ASU, when and how.  And, she’s helped produce four books of family history on some of Arizona’s original families.

She also knows all about the role her husband, Joel Benedict’s, family played in shaping Arizona education.  His mother, Getha Munds Benedict, attended the Arizona Territorial Normal School in 1900, and her five children all attended the state teacher’s college.

Irene met Joel Benedict at ASU—then known as “Arizona State Teachers College”—where she was completing her master’s degree in education and he was a young professor researching the use of television as a teaching tool. She quickly became his life-long assistant, beginning with his ASU classes in photography and audio-visual teaching techniques. A decade later, she married the man she still refers to affectionately as “Dr. B.”“I always felt ours was more of a teacher-student relationship,” she laughs. “Even after we married in 1962, Joel would ‘grade’ my evening meals. If any dish received a ‘C,’ I never made it again.”

She has written a monograph recounting the couple’s year as visiting professor and spouse in Enugu, Nigeria. “The Benedicts in Nigeria” contains a wealth of information about that nation, the rigors of travel to Africa in 1962, and the people and places the couple saw as they helped Nigerians modernize their educational methods.

On their return, Irene became a media specialist and librarian with the Tempe School District, a position she held for the next 20 years. During these years, she continued to assist “Dr. B.” during trips abroad to teach others about his advances in audio-visual tools and teaching methods. He became ASU’s Director of Media Research and Development in 1974 and received the Medallion of Merit in 1985 for his significant contributions to public schooling in Arizona.  He is the first person elected to the Hall of Fame in the ASU College of Education.

Together, the couple established the Dr. Joel A. and Irene A. Benedict Visual Literacy Collection at ASU and created a trust to benefit ASU’s Hayden Library. Irene then set up a scholarship fund in honor of her husband upon his death in 2001.

Irene Benedict says that she knew she wanted to teach from the time she started school, even when she was working as head of the women’s division at the police department in her Michigan hometown. When she married her first husband, Charles M. Andrews, and moved to Arizona, she found an opportunity to live that dream. She enrolled at ASU, and the rest is history.

“I had always yearned for a teaching career,” she says. “ASU gave me the opportunity to realize my dreams.”