The known world that I existed in before my orientation to the profession of the artist-teacher- researcher was largely rooted in the former of the three. I considered myself an interdisciplinary artist, practicing as part printmaker, part researcher and part human, using art as a form of catharsis. I brought my work to fruition through a lyrical balance of my personal experiences of trauma and philosophical thought on the symbolism of the house as both a protected and feared space. I was invigorated by the literature and theories I researched stumbling across potent subject matter derived from the influence of architecture on our experience and mentality and the disquieting slippage between what seems homely and what is unequivocally unhomely through an uncanny lens. Such research was influenced by the works of Rebecca Solnit, Gaston Bachelard, Anthony Vidler and Nicholas Royal, who I considered mentors that guided me through my practice. While I mark this period of inquiry as a past self in the context of this story, I can see now just how much the experiences, knowledge and values associated with my roles during this time are being called into question as I embark on a journey of reorientation to a new multifaceted role as an artist-teacher-researcher. I consider this process of reorientation to be my adapted version of Joseph Campbell's monomyth or the hero's journey as I begin this journey out of the current comforts of my relatively predictable safe world of knowing, into the unknown world of the artist-teacher- researcher, I become increasingly more disorientated, which perhaps needed to happen in order to authentically come out the other side. As an artist, I spent a great deal of time trying to reorientate myself in the art world, whereby the orientation to my profession referred solely to that of a practising artist. However, I chose a different calling, an unknown, and now beginning the process of reorientating myself to this new multifaceted role of an artist-teacher- researcher, and this is what I called the call to adventure. Reaching an authentic understanding of my practical theories as a teacher required a deep connection between myself and my appreciative systems. Sifting through my years of personal experience as an artist, a student, a student-teacher, and in general, a living human being, I had to come to my own understanding of the deeper reasons why I wanted to become a teacher. From this perspective, I was able to identify that I felt I owed a lot of my personal development and success to the teachers that looked after me throughout my time in school. As someone who felt like the only safe environment in their life was that of the school and specific rooms within it, I hold a close association of safety and care to the teachers that provided it to me, so when I ask myself why I want to become a good teacher, I reflect on my personal experiences that lure me towards the idea of becoming the one good adult in the lives of my students, even if it is just one. To add more depth to this heavy-weighted question of the reason why I want to become a teacher, I also had to consider all of the transmitted knowledge that was communicated by the other, the ways in which I've interpreted life's pool of media influence, literature, and social interactions that formed a lot of the concepts, ideologies, and theories that make up my worldview. This view and understanding of the world and myself plays a significant role in how I currently adhere to existing structures, how I choose to accept or challenge beliefs, and it acts as a schema that organises and frames the way of explaining and acting upon them. So, if I want to become a teacher because I want to be that one good adult for someone, I also need to factor in that I have sensitive beliefs that there is a lot more to be learned about the world than is made readily available or accessible to the younger generation. As I add more definition to my answer, I am left asking myself why I care about this specifically, and why these are my reasons for becoming a teacher. That is where my values come to the forefront. Dominating without singular effect on the structure of my practical theories, what I set the pace for this journey are those of compassion, trust, and creativity. Despite coming to a sense of surety about my initial practical theories, the first of many choices came early on that caused me to doubt my adequacy of reorientation. Jim Gleeson's text asked me what sort of teacher do I want to be. My options were limited to critical and creatively constructive, or compliant, conformist, and conservative. This text housed what I perceived as blinking warning signs for what is to come, that while I am idealistic and enthusiastic now, it won't last and I will quickly become jaded by the prevailing culture of education, the school's context, and its challenges. When faced with an opportunity to refuse this call, I chose to commit and set it despite this scary quote. There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to conduct than to initiate a new order of things, for the reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all of those who profit by the new order. Now that I know what I am committing to, I present what seems like an endless supply of helping hands that are going to help me maintain my commitments. I consider the first mentor to be the one who introduced me to the power of a triangle. Robert presented me with his carefully crafted schema built upon these notions of levels that existed within a simple triangle, made not so simple when it's reversed back to on itself and turned into a rectangle that houses what seems like the answers to any question I might have about anything. I won't try and elaborate on what it was actually intended for, but this is how I used it. I am trying to go from simply reading a text made up of theoretical literature that means nothing to me at this present moment. I must start somewhere, so I place myself as the student at point A. I am looking facing forward at this wall full of literature I need to understand. On the other side of the wall is the writer who acts as my teacher in this instance, and they are at point B. They are holding a lot of clues close to their chest that would me understand this writing on the wall better, so I need to get to them and somehow ask them for those clues. So I approach this wall in front of me that is only three steps away from me, however each step I need to acquire something about the text in order to move forward. I take my first step by reading the words on the wall. I take my second once I think I understand what I am reading, and with the third one I can see a few more sentences I couldn't see before. That makes me understand it a bit more. I am at the wall now and all of a sudden the wall appears transparent and there is writing on the other side, so I take my time to read it backwards, and with that reading I end up on the other side. It takes me two more steps to reach point B, so I break it down further dissecting each paragraph and what it is telling me at the start versus the end. The third step happens when I realise that the text was crafted, and I am talking to the writer now and he is giving me his clues. I start heading back to point A now but it doesn't exist anymore. The triangle has flipped now and I have taken the steps all over again to get to the other side. This time, however, I have already banked my original experience, and now I am reflecting back, structuring myself based upon my deeper understanding of what I have just read. This reflection has been paramount in my personal ability to critically analyse the new theoretical concepts in this body of literature, and only by doing this can I truly challenge any assumptions I have rigorously. I go through my own series of levels that appear to mirror a process of the madman architect, carpenter and judge. I am taking my original experience of this text and reworking it in a way that allows me to contextualise it in terms of its relevance to me as a new teacher, critiquing it as I move along by bringing my own appreciative systems into question. When I have reached the utmost level of my own personalised deep understanding, I see these triangles appear once again, this time working in tandem together, as a rectangular house that amplifies the importance of this literature. I felt it was important to emphasise the impact of this way of working in the context of this module. Without being introduced to this method, I would imagine that I wouldn't have been able to resonate to what I was being asked as a reflective teacher, so that was how my first mentor introduced me to a supernatural aid in this journey. Then there is the helping hands of my community of practice. The community of practice that has formed as part of my journey of reorientation to the profession of the artist, teacher, researcher are the amazing bunch of my fellow PME1 peers that over the past four months have banded together for both the purpose of learning and as a result of learning through our combined interactions that fostered a greater understanding and appreciation for what it means to reorientate ourselves. The three main domains and characteristics of the COP, as outlined by Wengner, are the domain, community and practice. To reach a greater awareness of how we became a COP in the first place, I considered the essential nature of our shared domain of interest as being our reorientation as artists, teachers and researchers. Entering the teaching profession from relatively similar backgrounds, the membership solidified itself as we all highlighted our commitment to this reorientation early on and have since shared equitable competence in our efforts to remain committed. Our sense of community occurred naturally as a result of our frequent engagement with each other, not only throughout our designated COP sessions but also the joint activities and discussions throughout the PME itself. Our practice took on many forms and we brought our own unique resources from our backgrounds as individual artists. We shared our new tools and resources we were learning that aided our teaching and interacted regularly, discussing problems and solutions that aided our development as artists, teachers and researchers. This concept of the COP that we came to embody provided the evidence that supported the learning theory of the apprenticeship, whereby complex social relationships can provide a great deal of learning for all involved. And this is where the COP term was coined. The community practice that we have formed is not only beneficial to our current journey but will stand to me when I enter the education system and work to reframe it as a broader learning system. My continued involvement in COPs outside of where I am now will aid me internally as a teacher on how to ground school learning and practice. I can see this happening through my involvement in COPs with the shared domain of teachers of visual art in the Irish education system, who are committed to sharing experiences and resources and participating in deep contemplative discussion about how we can better support our students by becoming experts in our field, which may include some of the challenges associated with becoming more knowledgeable about the newly introduced curriculum changes in our subjects. It wasn't until I became more aware of the relevance of COPs that I realised I was actually part of one myself back in my own secondary school. We were called the Roommate Art Project and it started off as a result of a master's degree art student coming to our school and setting up this group that invited anyone to join if they shared an interest in creating art on social issues that affected them. This community amplified what Wagner called social learning spaces. Without over- complicating it, this was the turning point that led me towards a deeper connection with my voice as an artist. A lot of what I had known occurred when exploring the concept of the artist- teacher. To preface this, I want to make reference to how Prentice 1995 highlights that it's significant that the vast majority of intending teachers of art and design are motivated by a very strong subjective allegiance and by an equally strong sense of personal identity. First and foremost, they see themselves as teachers of art and design with roots firmly embedded in their identity as person, artist, craft person or designer. What occurred to me during my critical analysis of my own dual identity as an artist and teacher was that connecting my art practice and teaching practice was going to be extremely challenging and complex and that I would need some sort of framework for realising it and sustaining it. Hall provided me with a way to make this possible as he introduced the framework of reflective practice or reflexivity. This process would require me to live with my research by deeply immersing myself in self-dialogue, articulating my tactics and acquiring intuitive knowledge. The identity of the artist tends to be quite fluid, open and uncertain, especially in the early stages, but now I'm being required to complement this with the more technical and rational nature of the curriculum and assessment constraints I'll be dealing with as a teacher. However, Hall's promotion of reflexive practice also means that for our teachers can forge and maintain their hybrid identities, it provides some hope that this may be possible. While his definition screams complex, I can see how it aids the reorientation of two seemingly disparate identities into one through professional experience that will only come to me as I go through it, signifying to me that I probably won't ever feel like I've reached a conclusion. Instead, I'll reach a sense of harmony and balance as I use my art practice to inform my teaching and my reflective practice to reframe my identity. Simply put, it will be a slow-burning process. Some of the members of the COP brought what they felt was the most important things for them. A expressed that they were going to really have to assess their art practice in the context of their teaching. S was hesitant at the idea of having to be reflexive in the first place. She felt that all of these things, while beneficial for our development, take up a lot of time and resources, which are often limited to why and how we are required to do it. We concluded that we would be met with a lot of pushback from traditional education systems and powerholders, who would probably be sceptical and never truly understand its value to us. For me, I considered that within this unknown world of reorientation, I was going to have to interrelate the sub-worlds within it. The art world, the world of education, and the world of art education, which all have their own practices to be negotiated and assimilated by the artist- teacher, taking into account their individual histories, culture and literature. There will be many times when one world undermines the significance of the other, and being part of all of these worlds, I will be left with sub-parts of myself, undermining others, which will be a challenge. For this not to derail me, I will need to place significant importance on my personal commitment, take advantage of opportunities to engage in both art and art education-related activities in my own time, for the purpose of my personal development, and most importantly, become strong in my beliefs of my subject, my passion and my teaching ability, and my own art practice, that will override the counter-remarks of my enemies, that will try and tell me that those things aren't a priority, and that my subject is of second-class status, and that the only goal is to provide exclusive focus on art production. As I deepen my reorientation, I must enter research mode and acquire robust, self-questioning disciplines as my base, to craft my own qualities and practices, as they relate to solidifying my reflective living inquiry. Instead of approaching my inquiry as a personal process, which suggests a separation of the selves, I must carry it out as a life process, whereby it is my core and my new reorientation as an artist, teacher, researcher. I must contemplate where I am when I am multiple, understand and speak a new language where silencing of our teachers is booming, comprehend the time when I have three watches on my wrist ticking at different intervals, and a clock overhead that tells a different story, and most importantly, I must observe myself and others, understanding that belonging to the world means sharing otherness, and knowing the world myself is important, so I can instruct others about it in my classroom. All of these things require intent and a deep sense of purpose, and conducting these inquiries in cycles of rhythms and a discipline of moving back and forth between action and reflection is what will form a deeper professional practice. What's today as critical for me, and of our COP group, is the acknowledgement of the research as a political practice. Research is a political process in many ways, who researches and how, whose experiences are researched and how that is named or categorised, what discourses gain currency and hold power, what forms of inquiry and writing are favoured by the mainstream power holders, and much more are political issues, therefore creating knowledge is a political business and living practice is thus politicised. Through engaging and responding to theoretical literature, I reclaim the power over my time and how I use it. As Brookfield explains, it is the realisations that will prevent teachers from mistakenly blaming their personal inadequacies for situations that are politically created. Therefore, there is power in the knowing of the reality so that I can use my time challenging change instead of wasting my time self-depreciating. As I approach my goals of reorientation through the disorientation that has been endured up to this point, what I went on this journey to get is closer to my reach. To be too idealised as an art teacher is not so much a bad thing when it is channelled in the right way, and that is where I exist externally as opposed to withering away far too early as is frequently observed in the art teacher profession. There is an ideological basis to teaching, and to obtain apolitical neutrality is to accept the right of the governing bodies and authorities of our educational system. It is to allow the enemies to prescribe what educational processes should look like and how learning should be defined and judged. However, the ideological basis that exists has been constructed and framed by human agency, therefore it is capable of being dismantled and reframed by students and teachers. What I have learned from this, and the way to do it, is to minimise the risk involved, i.e. disrupt the comfort without subjecting ourselves to negative consequences. I see the work of COPs fitting in here somewhere, prompting colleagues to question their taken-for-granted assumptions in a way that doesn't imply they are the enemy too. This is how I see myself surviving the turmoil that I will likely encounter in schools and making it a place I want to be. This made me think about my art teacher in secondary school. She was new, but once she was comfortable and adjusted, slowly things started to change. The art room was now a valuable place in the school, and the activities and work that usually only took place within it was now infiltrating the walls of the school, and its status was no longer lower order. A phrase that she would always use was act now and ask for permission later. Over time, when her actions provided positive outcomes, she collected what Shaw noted as deviance credits, which were institutional brownie points teachers accrued by taking on tasks that earned them a reputation of organisational loyalists. Her status in the school now is far more respected than I have ever heard of an art teacher being, and that was my ultimate boon. In the context of my journey out of the comforts and relatively predictable safe world of the knowing into the unknown world of the artist-teacher-researcher, I became increasingly more disorientated. However, I am returning with far more than just a new perspective, but also a multi-lens perspective that sees me standing outside myself and viewing what I do through Brookfield's four lenses. My autobiography as a teacher and a learner, the eyes of my students, my colleagues' experiences, and most relevant to this module through theoretical literature. In this way, I avoid seeking out people who share my assumptions using them as mirrors, and instead systematically search out an alternative viewpoint that I need to further investigate. To reflect back on my original answer of why I wanted to become a teacher, I cited my values as compassion, trust, and creativity. While these still stand relatively steady, I am coming out of this journey with a new core value of integrity. Ironically, it was quoted as one of the four ethical values in the professional conduct for teachers. However, my own sense of integrity is born from my commitment to the sustainability of my identity as an artist-teacher-researcher, and how that is exercised to positively impact my students. I want to end with where I ended up with a quote that I felt was quite fitting to describe my ending of this cycle of inquiry. Sometimes inquiring brings what I invite but not the form or realm that I anticipate.