Erin Scheessele, PhD

Workshop Presenter

Events

Workshop – Orgelkids: How To Harness This Powerful Tool
Convention Hotel
7/10/2020 9:00 AM – 9:50 AM

About

Erin Scheessele (rhymes with “Nestlé” or “Presley”) founded and serves as the volunteer Executive Director of Orgelkids USA. She studied biology at Duke University and earned her doctorate at Oregon State University in ecology, investigating amphibian declines. Erin has taught at Duke University, Oregon State University, and Willamette University.

Erin made the jump from frogs to pipe organs after she decided to take a break from academia to raise her two sons, the eldest of whom fell in love with pipe organs at age two. The Scheessele family undertook to launch Orgelkids USA as a family project with all four family members contributing and learning new skills along the way. Exploring its capabilities and helping grow the availability of Orgelkids has taken the Scheessele family to Maker Faires in Seattle and Portland, OR, AGO conventions in Salt Lake City and Montreal, Canada, as well as workshops in Haarlem, Netherlands, and Taiwan. Their adventures with Orgelkids have been published in The American Organist & Vox Humana.

From her work in the field of conservation biology, Erin recognized one of its tenets in the motivation underlying Orgelkids: “In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught,” Baba Dioum (1968).