Furniture Making

As I have been thinking about blogging my experience in earning my PhD I have been wondering what on Earth I could write about that might be meaningful to someone reading my posts. I still do not have a clear picture in my mind but working on the creation of this portfolio page (which happens to be a required aspect of my program) I have been impressed with two aspects of furniture making that I have experience in. The first of these is the challenges associated with repairing and restoring broke down and/or worn out pieces of furniture. In the images below you will find a chair I was asked to repair and refinish. The spindle between two legs had been chewed by the family dog and their was water damage and mold from sitting for years in the basement. This was just a neglected chair, and while still functional was in need of work to bring it back into full use by the owner.

The second is the challenges associated with building a completely new piece of furniture. In this next set of images you will find a few of the pieces I have created based other related pieces I have seen, either in person or as images.

In both of these cases I made some key decisions along the way that had an impact on the final results. When working on a repair/restoration/refurbishment project one is trying to take something already in existence and make much needed repairs and improvements. However, there are no modifications being made to the original design. One is just bringing it back into working order and returning it to a once lost quality and usefulness. On the other hand, when designing a new piece one begins with a set of raw materials and brings them together forming the final piece, modifying them along the way. This draws my thinking to all the levels of transformations my classroom lessons have undergone during my years as a high school science teacher. I think about how class period reactions to a lesson activity resulted in slight modifications to the planned material for the next class period, leading to better classroom engagement as the day went along. Sometimes bigger decisions, like whether or not to glue up individual boards to form large panels or just go out and purchase a sheet of plywood dictates the modifications needed to create the desired outcome in creating a cabinet or bench. Sometimes I got to the end of the year and dropped whole sections of material only bring them back a few years later, with needed updates based on usefulness of content and improvements to technology. Just as my skill level improved over time with each piece of furniture I created, repaired, restored or refurbished my skills as a teacher has improved with each successive lesson.

Today I no longer teach in a high school classroom, rather I design instructional material for use within those science classrooms. I have come to understand that as I develop these classroom resources I must focus on two distinct aspects - instruction and learning. It appears, as found in the majority of the articles I have read over the past few years, that these are generally lumped into one overarching principle and very few people differentiate between the unique stand alone activities of instructional design and learning design. Most often these two terms are used interchangeably to mean the same thing. I have come to realize that there is very distinct differences between instructional design which focuses on the teacher and instructional aspects of education and learning design which focuses on the learner and the learning aspects of education. I have begun to see that some times, much like repairing furniture, teachers and learners are simply dusting off, making minor repairs, and bring back into functional use pieces of knowledge that have been neglected (even worn out on occasion) during the passage of time and the living of life. Other times these same individuals are actively creating completely new pieces of knowledge from the raw materials available to them. This may include the need to make due with what they have on hand (similar to gluing ups a series of boards to create a larger panel) or going out and "purchasing" a needed item through formal or informal educational experiences (similar to buying a sheet of plywood). Each one is making decisions that will impact the efforts of the other, similar to having two individuals working on the same piece of furniture. When these are in harmony the final product is a work of art and when they are not, lets just say you might not want to sit in that chair.