From Comix to Comics

Dr. Fraser Bennett studied French in high school, but may have learned more from the stack of Astérix comics in the back of the classroom than from the actual instruction.

It’s not a condemnation of high school education, as much as an insight into the fact that if you want kids to learn, you’ve got to speak to them in a language that they know and understand. It is also indicative of the fact that there are many, many ways a person can come to have a love of languages.

It might be argued that a love of languages is in Fraser’s blood.

Born in Tucson, Fraser grew up in the northern suburbs of DC hearing stories about his grandmother’s work as a medical missionary in India in the 1930s. When Fraser was eleven years old, she took Fraser’s entire family to visit the town in India where she had established a hospital for women and children. There she was warmly greeted by the town elders, who honored her in long meetings with long speeches that  Fraser could not understand. So perhaps it was that feeling—the feeling of being a linguistic outsider—that sparked his interest in language.

Whatever it was, Fraser forayed deeper into language. He took Russian in college, some Hebrew, and Greek. He tried (and failed) to learn Navajo one summer in Arizona. Eventually he majored in linguistics, mostly because he thought it was a lot of fun. 

Halfway through a PhD program at the University of Illinois, Fraser found himself in Thailand doing phonological research on a group of Tibeto-Burman languages. Most of the speakers of these languages were refugees living in bamboo houses in refugee camps. But they were passionately concerned for the education of their kids, and they allowed Fraser into their community if he would teach English to their teachers.

Gradually, in addition to his research and teaching duties, Fraser also began to help them prepare educational materials. 

“They wanted to write primary-grade schoolbooks in their language,” he recalls, “and they wanted to use a computer to do it. They had a Windows 3.1 computer, which they kept in the nearest town that had electricity. The trouble was that they use a unique alphabet, used by no other language in the world. I had no background in type design or script engineering, but I helped them make a TrueType computer font for their script so they could type their language on a computer.”

After Fraser returned to Illinois, he documented  the script, which eventually became part of the Unicode standard. It can now be used on any modern computer operating system, and is in robust use for everything from websites to Facebook posts.

Fraser speaks with pleasure of having played a part in that. From a kid frustrated at having to wait while his grandma spoke a language he couldn’t understand, he had come to help provide others with a tool so that they could be understood.

Fraser carried that experience with him through the subsequent years as he finished his PhD (a painful process that taught him to really appreciate good academic research), met his wife, moved to Dallas, and then went back to Thailand. There he was the department chair of the Linguistics Department at Payap University in Chiang Mai, a cooperative venture between the University and SIL that focuses on lingusitics and research for development. The work was exciting, but a family health crisis forced Fraser and his family to return to the United States. What he expected to be a short visit turned into seventeen years spent working with SIL in Dallas.

“I sometimes say that most of our children are native Texans,” Fraser laughs, “so they can’t revoke our visas.” 

For his last twelve years with SIL, Fraser served as SIL’s  International Training Director, coordinating and developing training resources for SIL’s network of training programs around the world. He worked for part of that time under SIL LEAD’s executive director, Dr. Paul Frank, when Paul was SIL’s Vice President of Academic Affairs. So when Fraser felt he was reaching the end of his run at his job (“it was time to let someone else take a whack at it”), the decision to join SIL LEAD was an easy one.

Fraser came on board with SIL LEAD this past June. It has been a steep learning curve: while he was familiar with some of the parameters of the work from his time at SIL, SIL LEAD operates in a very different context,  with a different network of partners and a different set of expectations.

Still, Fraser realized he’d been missing the classroom, and the joy he’d felt all those years ago developing educational materials in that bamboo village in Thailand. He speaks with pleasure of hopping back into the teaching role—working to update educational materials to “make sure they sing.”

He adds, “I like SIL LEAD because it’s a group of motivated people who are working really hard to fill a niche that I don’t see anyone else working in—bringing their expertise in minority language education to the international development world. It allows all that amazing expertise that SIL has built up over the last 80 years to flow into a different set of networks, a different set of programs that really need what we can provide, in order to…I’ll say, to bless the millions of kids that we’re able to touch.  The scope is amazing. It’s a privilege to be a part of it.”

A love of language and joy felt in service has taken Fraser on a great adventure. From Astérix comics in the back of a French classroom, he is now helping to provide educational materials—some of them even in comic book form—to millions of children around the world.

A comic from one of our 2019 CBLD Grantees, the IBT Torwali Project.