Essay On Deaf In The Military

Deaf in the Military
“Sorry, no. You’re deaf.” That is what Keith Nolan was told too many times to count. Because of ideologies, the general public considers deaf individuals to be handicapped or disabled. However, this is not the case. Those who are deaf or hard-of-hearing are more than capable of doing most of the things hearing people can do. In this paper, I relate the Ted Talk, “Deaf in the Military,” to communities of practice.
After investigating and writing the research paper, “Deaf in the Military,” Nolan discovered that 80 percent of military jobs are non-combat positions. The U.S. military also has retained their disabled soldiers, so “why can’t they accept disabled citizens as well?” Nolan was finally accepted into the ROTC program and is the first deaf cadet private. The ROTC itself is a community of practice. Ahearn states (2012:143), “just as learning takes place not just in an individual’s head but in the social interactions in which that individual takes part, so too does language reside not just in an individual’s head but in

The first, mutual engagement simply means that there is interaction among community members. This frequency of this contact does not have to be consistent or recurrent. On Nolan’s ROTC base, the cadets participate in physical training as well as field training labs and occasionally weekend training. “When you train and sweat together, you feel the bond of camaraderie right away,” Nolan said.
The second principle, joint enterprise, is the common goal that participants work toward. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1998:490) write, “the community of practice takes us away from the community defined by a location or by a population. Instead, it focuses on a community defined by social engagement.” In Nolan’s case, the unifying goal is passing through the four levels of the ROTC program. Upon graduation, ROTC students have a military career ready and waiting for