Advocacy for disabilities run awry
What is amiss about this video encouraging the public to seek help for students with LD?
In the early part of the 21st century, a group of organizations published a series of public service announcements in an effort to encourage people to seek help for children with learning disabilities. The Coordinated Campaign for Learning Disabilities collaborated with the US-based Advertising Council (usually known as Ad Council), a non-profit organization that promotes public service efforts, to air a series of brief media—television and radio—about learning disabilities.
As I recall (and I’m checking with colleagues to strengthen my certainty about this), the purpose of the spots was to increase awareness about learning disabilities among the general population and to encourage parents to seek help for children and youths who might have LD. I also recall that there was an evaluation (maybe a survey and a study of referral records?) of whether the ad campaign had effects. One or more Dear Readers may remember this better than I do—please contribute to the discussion!
Here is one of the videos. Take a look (it’s quite brief, as PSAs usually are) and then read on for a couple of observations.
Here are a couple of questions-concerns about this video:
It’s available on YouTube and is being described as making the poster’s “a$$ feel trippy (see description on YT). Hmmm…one might take from this a caution about how one’s posts on the Intertubes may be repurposed by someone who happens upon those posts. I don’t know Joshua Carino, the YTer who uploaded the video, nor his intentions in showing this PSA (among the many he has posted), but I doubt that his purposes are nefarious. Someone else might, however, reuse the video in less-than-benign ways.
The video is posted under a fair-use claim. There’s no attribution or notification of the copyright holder. I’ve been searching for copyright information for this and other videos (and radio spots) in the series published by Coordinated Campaign for Learning Disabilities. I’ve not found a Web presence for the Coordinated Campaign for Learning Disabilities.
This video perpetuated an unfounded description of dyslexia and LD. Reversals of letters and numerals (and transposition of letters and numbers) are not indicators of LD (see “Correcting Reversals” and “Reversals redux”). Mixing up the order of digits in a phone number is not an indicator that the mixer-upper has LD! It’s a myth. We should help the public learn this.
I’m hoping that my sleuthing will help me identify the copyright holder for these videos. I have original copies of 10-12 more of these spots. I shall be sharing them over the coming months, as I think it is valuable for we denizens of SETland to see how some advocacy was happening in the early 2000s.