TheStar.com | HealthZone | Personal stories tell disability history

TheStar.com | HealthZone | Personal stories tell disability history: "'The pressure on me to breathe without (a ventilator) lasted five years,' Essex says – until her father put his foot down. With the help of a newly invented chest-size breathing apparatus, Rev. Roy Essex ignored the protests of the institution's doctors and took his daughter home.

'That was the beginning of the rest of my life,' says Essex, now 71 and a grandmother. 'I could breathe and sleep without gasping for air."

Out From Under: Disability, History and Things to Remember at the Royal Ontario Museum in April [17] and runs until July 17, 2008.

IT GOES FROM APRIL 17 THROUGH JULY 16 2008 - ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM

Learning & Teaching Office - Ryerson University: "A child’s trunk. A pile of 16 neatly folded grey sweat suits. A Canadian flag. On their own, they may not have anything in common. But together, they are a part of an activist exhibition of Canadian Disability History created by students, alumni, community collaborators and faculty in the School of Disability Studies.

It started with a history course, a pedagogical innovation in which each participant was asked to arrive not with a head full of ideas but with an everyday object. Subverting the notion of history as grand events, these “things” chronicled a hidden history of significant struggle in the lives of people with disabilities and their allies.

Out From Under: Disability, History and Things to Remember at the Royal Ontario Museum in April [17 and runs until July 17, 2008. It is a unique exhibit and a groundbreaking event as disability history becomes public history at one of Canada’s pre-eminent museums.

In their presentation, the speakers will illuminate the discoveries they made as “one thing just led to another” along the pathway from teachers to curators. The biggest discovery was how fruitful it can be to fall into history. Unexpected riches emerge when you move from ‘knowing’ to ‘wondering’ and from ‘telling’ to ‘trusting."