Inspirational video: Bringing art and possibility to our thinking about being disabled
Meet Aimee Mullin, a woman with 12 pairs of legs. She presents a thought provoking and beautiful lesson on how we need to change our thinking about being disabled and the disabled. She has incorporated creativity and art into her prosthetic legs in a most amazing way. She brings up the point that adults superimpose rules on children about disabled people, like “now, don’t stare at her legs” which is going to make the children look. Rather, she ingeniously allowed children to enter her presentation she refers to that she did in the past and let them take the lead. They headed right to the table of legs and began exploring them.
As an aside, “child led learning” is what I am learning to do in a speech class that is designed to help my daughter learn to talk. It is the most valuable approach to learning because children learn more when they show you what they are interested in learning.
Aimee Mullin makes a brilliant comparison between herself and Pamela Anderson; she says that Pamela has more prosthetics in her body than she does –yet Pamela isn’t called disabled!
This little break from your everyday reality will refresh you, I promise!
My daughter is classified as disabled because she has Down syndrome. It makes me think about the dangers of labeling people. The disabled child knows they’ve been pigeonholed by their peers on the playground, by siblings who rush to get the best pickings and by well meaning relatives who coddle them to in-selfsuffiency or who don’t come around at all because they can’t deal with reality. In the case of Down syndrome, developmentally disabled children have every opportunity today to get an early start on education so they can keep up with normal/typical kids. So, it is interesting to note that kids that act like other kids, have feelings like other kids and can participate fully in life get labeled as disabled. In Spain, an actor recently received their highest award in film and another young man is getting his Master’s degree in psychology –and both have Down syndrome. I hope someday that people who are labeled “disabled” have the opportunity to have it erased from their public record if it no longer applies. But I have digressed beyond the point of this video.
If we didn’t label people as disabled, and we didn’t know they were, would we interact with them differently? Does knowing they’re disabled help us or help them?
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