Madly Friesen and their students at the Faraday School in Winnipeg’s North End had the same reaction when they found out that they had received an $18,000 grant from MusiCounts: jaws dropped on the floor.
“Getting to hear that my school was going to receive that much funding towards programming was absolutely incredible,” Friesen shared in an interview on Morning Light. “Just knowing that those dreams were going to come true was overwhelming.”
“A MusiCounts grant of $15,000 to $20,000 can be transformative,” Regan Harvey, MusiCounts’ executive director said in a statement. “It can help establish a full K–6 elementary music program, purchase concert band instruments that will serve students for years to come, introduce culturally connected programming, or bring new technology into the classroom. These investments give educators more tools to engage students and help young people build practical, transferable skills through music.”
Student-led arts instruction
Friesen, who has only been at the Faraday School for a year, notes that a grant like this can help them pursue a different type of arts education for their students. “I teach performing arts – drama, dance and music,” they explain, “but whatever we’re doing, whatever we’re working on, it looks creative and playful. Students have a voice in what we’re doing and what kind of music we’re learning and what kind of songs we’re doing and how they participate in their own learning.”
“Sometimes it looks chaotic, sometimes it sounds loud, but it’s always creative and playful,” they add with a laugh.
The passion that the students have for their own arts experiences helped to fuel the grant-writing process. “I asked some of the students, ‘What would you be interested in having as a program?’” Friesen shares. “One student had a really great perspective, and she was saying that, ‘I’m in grade six and I don’t have a ton of opportunities or places to express myself and express my feelings, express my thoughts. If I could write a song, if I could play my feelings out in an instrument, that would give me space that I didn’t have before.’”
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New instruments and skills
The new grant money that the Faraday School has received will go towards creating the spaces that students want to make. Friesen notes that new instruments are already arriving at the school to create a contemporary music ensemble, including electric and bass guitars, keyboards and drum kits.
“It’s a bit of a deviation from maybe what you would think that elementary music education could or would look like,” Friesen says, “but having the grant allows me to offer that specific program that would be prohibitively expensive.”
“Because organizations like this exist to fuel the imagination of music educators and music education students in public schools, I get to offer this program that the students would love, that I would love to teach, and that we would all love to be doing together.”
The $18,000 awarded to the Faraday School is just a small part of MusiCounts’ investment in Canadian arts education. The charity, which is affiliated with the Juno Awards which will be held in Winnipeg next spring, will provide support to 96 schools across the country in the amount of $1.4 million.