Dad's alumni award application

The Brigham Young University Emeriti Alumni Association presents awards to members of the association who have made a significant contribution in an area such as their family, church, community, or profession. Nominees should be members of the class of 1967 or before or be retired BYU employees. Limit information to this document (no additional pages will be accepted). Type or print legibly. Please return the nomination sheet before Monday, October 9, 2006.

Nominee’s Name: Robert Wallace Blair
Telephone: (801) 426-4775
E-mail: robertwblair@yahoo.com
Address:
City/State/Zip Code
Ward and Stake Edgemont 9th – Edgemont Stake
Age: 76
Occupation: Retired BYU professor; founder & president, Enhanced Learning Concepts
Education: BA, 1955; MA, 1957 (both BYU); PhD, 1964 (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Dates attended BYU: 1948-1954
Graduated from BYU: 1955 (BA); 1957 (MA)
Name of Spouse: Julia Groberg
Children: Margaret B. Young, Dell W. Blair, Robert G. Blair, Jenette B.
Lambert, Lisa B. Sabey, James G. Blair, Benjamin W. Blair,
Carolyn B. Madsen (31 grandchildren, 2 great grandchildren)

Please supply the following information about the nominee:

Service to the Family: A devoted father, Robert Blair has encouraged his children to learn languages and have experiences with many cultures world-wide. His children grew up with temporary residents in the Blair home from all over the world–from Guatemala to China. Robert has taken family members to Guatemala, Russia, and China, and for a time both he and his son Dell served as missionaries in Ecuador. (Robert was helping the missionaries learn Quichua.) Family vacations were sometimes used as language-learning opportunities, most notably when the family bought a run-down bus and drove it to Montreal, Canada, where all the Blairs learned Esperanto. As a result of this focus on languages and cultures, most of his children speak at least one second language, and two of his sons work with the family language-learning company that Robert helped found. All four of his sons and two of his daughters have served full-time missions, and all eight are active Latter-day Saints and world travelers.

Service to the Church: Robert served a mission to Finland from 1950-53. He later served as the first mission president of the Baltic States Mission (1993-96). He has also served as a branch president and member of several High Councils and has had special assignments from the Church’s Missionary and Translation Departments, including coordinating several MTC language training programs and starting pre-MTC training programs for senior missionaries in Spanish and French. On Church assignment, Robert trained missionaries to speak Indian dialects in Guatemala and later took a busload of returned missionaries there to write dictionaries of the dialects they had learned. Several of those missionaries have stated that their lives were changed under Robert’s influence and example. Two now serve in Church translation, and one has been a mission president in Guatemala. Robert Blair’s influence is silently present in many of the Book of Mormon translations. Even now, he continues to work in the missionary endeavor, serving as a volunteer at the MTC for missionaries preparing to serve in Mandarin, Spanish, Russian, and Finnish.



Service to the Community: Robert did volunteer work with the Utah-China project in Beijing from 2002-3 and has served as the Chairman of the Board for the Foundation for Indian Development in Guatemala. He has provided service and support to the Rose Foundation (set up by one of the missionaries he worked with in developing dialect dictionaries). The Peace Corps used him to develop language material for several languages and countries and to train volunteers from 1966-76. He has also provided publications for military language training. Over the past five years, he has served in China with his wife as a teacher and a good-will ambassador. Closer to home, he has served as a volunteer at the Utah State Hospital.

Professional Activities: In addition to PhD work at Indiana University, Robert spent a postdoctoral year as research associate in Maya at the University of Chicago. He joined the BYU faculty in 1959, where he was the founding chairman of the Linguistics Department. With his wife Julia, he was one of the first to travel to China as a teacher (Shandong University, 1980-81) as a pioneer of what eventually became the Kennedy Center China Program, which he helped to found. The two also taught in Russia (Moscow State University, 1992) and again in China (several programs in Nankai and Beijing, 1999-2005). His book Innovative Approaches to Language Teaching has found international praise and use. He has also worked independently and with linguistics students to author many language courses and dictionaries in obscure but precious dialects, including Yucatec Mayan, Cakchiquel, and Mam.

University Activities: As a member of BYU’s faculty, serving for forty years in the Linguistics Department he had helped to establish, Robert served on many committees and mentored most of those currently employed as senior faculty members of the department. He developed new classes, such as language learning acquisition, where he taught aspiring linguists effective methods of teaching a language. Each student came out of that class with some capacity to carry on little conversations in five languages. He also taught regular and experimental courses in linguistics and various languages. Again, his real effect is inestimable, since so many of his students have reported that his classes changed their career directions and opened their lives up to new possibilities.

Honors Received:

1989: James L. Barker Lecturer in BYU’s College of Humanities

1992-94: NDEA Title VI Award

1998: Faculty speaker at the College of Humanities convocation

1998: Devotional speaker at BYU

2001-2005: Power-Glide Language Company, which Robert helped to found and for which he serves as consultant, has received numerous awards, including the Practical Home Schooling Reader's Choice Award for five consecutive years; Teacher's Choice Awards from Learning Magazine in 2004 and 2005; and selection three times as one of Utah’s 100 fastest growing companies.

Supporting or Additional Information:



Information Submitted by:
Name: Bruce Wilson Young (in association with Julia G. Blair & Margaret B. Young)
Telephone: (801) 375-9428 or (801) 422-2977
E-mail: Bruce_Young@byu.edu

Return this sheet before Monday, October 9, 2006 to:

BYU Emeriti Alumni Awards, c/o Robyn Pinegar
332 KMB, Provo, UT 84602
www.emeriti.byu.edu

To download a copy of the application, go to one of the following:
pdf or word doc