Elective Spotlight: Intro to Woodworking
Discipleship begins in and revolves around the home as it is there how they see God and the faith, the world, their place in it, their identity and how they will live in light of it. In our Introduction to Woodworking elective, while we will be working through the content mentioned in the course description, we will be explicitly to do so with the aim of beginning to instill a sense of confidence, usefulness, agency, artistic awareness, and a love for learning by doing. We’ll do this specifically through what is called the “sloyd method” which views education as an integrated endeavor of the body and mind using manual arts training to help inform academic, cognitive, and character development. In addition and most importantly, much of our lecture content, supplemental reading, and homework have the explicit objective of fostering opportunities for parent-child discipleship and spiritual formation. Some of those include:
- Developing a work ethic that isn’t scared of hard physical work and has the discipline, patience, and care to do what is necessary in order to do it well.
- Learning to see work as a good gift from God we are called to do and something that can be enjoyed both for the process, the result, and the purpose.
- Initiating an unplugged activity, and cultivate a rhythm of creative skilled work and rest in order to therefore understand more about the world, themselves, and God as the Creator through handcraft.
