Dr. Catherine Schmidt

Dr. Catherine Schmidt is Professor of Music Education at Winona State University and current Chair of the Department of Music. She also serves as program director for music education, and co-advisor for WSU's Collegiate Chapter of MENC: The National Association for Music Education. She is a past Classroom Vice-President on the Board of Directors for the Minnesota Music Educators Association and is currently Co-Chair of the MMEA New Teacher Mentoring Program.

Dr. Schmidt received both her B.S. and M.S. degrees in music education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her doctoral work focused on multicultural music education and her minor field was ethnomusicology. Other professional training includes Orff Certification from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Kodály Master Teacher Certificate from the University of Saint Thomas.

Dr. Schmidt has 12 years of experience in elementary classroom music and has presented workshops throughout the Midwest in Orff-Schulwerk, Kodály, multicultural music, and a variety of other topics in music education. In the summers of 1997 and 2000 she traveled to the Philippines where she served as guest clinician at the University of Saint Thomas in Manila and taught seminars for the department of education in several other provinces on the island of Luzon in multicultural music, elementary choral techniques, and music technology.

Dr. Schmidt’s current area of interest is in mentoring and new teacher induction. Her recent research, drawn from the MMEA Mentoring Initiative for new music teachers in Minnesota, has been presented at both the National Society for Music Teacher Education Colloquium in October of 2007 and the MENC: The National Association for Music Education Biennial Conference in March of 2008. This research is being published in the Proceedings from the 2007 National Society for Music Teacher Education Colloquium (forthcoming).