Meet our 2025 MusiCounts Teacher of the Year nominees — starting with Drew Van Allen from Mînî Thnî, AB.

The MusiCounts Teacher of the Year Award, presented by Anthem Entertainment, is happily celebrating its 20th anniversary recognizing and honouring exceptional Canadian music teachers each year.

Tune in to the 2025 JUNO Awards on Sunday, March 30 where the winner will be announced, and on our website & social media platforms @MusiCounts.

What is the music program like at your school? How did the MusiCounts grant make an impact?

Well, thanks for meeting me, by the way. Our music program is heavily influenced by technology, music production, the involvement of the kids in all aspects. Above everything, it's about fun [and] making it enjoyable. Because ultimately my goal is to try and make these students love music for the rest of their lives. So if we can tap into that enjoyment early in their music education, and do it through methods that they understand because this generation is so heavily mediadriven, that's what we're going to try and do.

The MusiCounts grant has allowed us to buy subscriptions to online music software programs that allow the kids to make their own music. We were also able to upgrade all of our xylophones because we've been using those a lot. And we were also able to build our own pow-wow drum…that was probably the biggest impact that the grant had.

Amazing to hear. And so, what does it mean to you to be nominated for the 2025 MusiCounts Teacher of the Year Award?

It's huge. You know, we weren't looking for validation. We were simply doing something that we found was great for us. It's really humbling and it's an honour to represent the Stoney community, the kids at our school, to give them an opportunity to take some accolades and say, "Hey, you're not just producing something for yourself, you're producing something for the world. You're telling the world your story and you should be really proud of that”. You can see that it inflates their confidence about who they are. They're not just Indigenous kids. They’re Indigenous kids in a modern society who have an enormous amount of creativity and it's great to give them that chance to shine.

[A/N: Seems like Drew Van Allen isn’t giving some credit to himself for the Award, but rather to his students which is so sweet!]

Do you have a music teacher or mentor that has inspired you?

So when I was first learning music, I'm pretty sure I was undiagnosed dyslexic. I couldn't get notes. It was really challenging for me. My parents, God bless them, they didn't give up. and I was failing at a conservatory piano and they found this woman, her name is Martha Spencer, and she taught this method of ear training. I was probably around 8 or 9, and that changed everything. I still use that theory that everyone learns differently and give students an opportunity to find their own path in music. So, definitely Martha, and I would say all of my friends that I've ever played music with. They have been a massive impact on me because when you're listening to other people, you're just learning, right? And when you hear yourself play with other people, you learn.

The cool thing about music is that it can be interpreted in so many different ways, and music itself is very accessible to anyone.

I think we're in an era where there's way more understanding of all these different methods and tactics. People trying to interpret themselves and interpret teaching through a variety of inroads. When you make something not intimidating, it becomes more accessible and fun. Let's remove the stigma behind, “I don't know how to learn an instrument”, “I don't know how to read notes”. Don't worry about that. Let's just bash out some tunes and see what comes of it, right?

Exactly, and a good thing with technology too is that maybe you don't have to be musically inclined, in terms of playing instruments. You can just learn how to produce that through computers. Either way, you're involved in music.

100%. I've got a 16-year-old who spent 3 or 4 years trying to learn guitar. He never found his place in it, but he did find his place in music production and he still does it to this day. Our kids at school, we try to give them every opportunity to find their voice. The curriculum will tell us all these things that we need to achieve, but if we can achieve confidence, self-respect and self-expression as a byproduct of following a very loose curriculum guideline, I mean, that's a wicked byproduct of music education right there.

The next question is a little bit of a fun one: what are you looking forward to doing at the 2025 JUNO Awards in Vancouver?

Oh my gosh… just being at the JUNOS. That's such a weird thing to process. I think being around like-minded people who can appreciate and value the importance of music education, how they've adopted music as a part of their life. I think that's going to be really fascinating, and to get some ideas from different cultural musicians. I'm really stoked about bumping into some Indigenous musicians because they're a very big part of our [school] motivation. We look at a lot of pow-wow drummers that are in our community and classroom. Just to get a west coast Indigenous perspective would be really great.

*Interview condensed for readability.