When Hesburgh Libraries Music Librarian Tiffany Gillaspy began reviewing entries for this year’s Public Domain Day Contest, she didn’t expect to hear the "voice" of Harriet Tubman…or God.

The entry, created by students from the Robinson Community Learning Center, featured fourth-grader Siya as Tubman and fifth-grader Dante as God, joined by more than a dozen participants in the Afterschool Theatre Lab. Ranging from first to eighth grade, half of the students took turns narrating an adapted version of the book “Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom,” while the other half sang along to an early recording of the song “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.”

“I was really impressed by their creativity,” Gillaspy said. “They took music from the public domain and a story that they had been learning about, and incorporated them all together with sound effects. They weren’t just reading the words; they were reinterpreting them. It was a comprehensive way of engaging with the story.”

The music contest, in its fourth year, serves as a staple of the Hesburgh Libraries’ annual Public Domain Day slate of events. It invites members of the campus community to create original compilations using sound recordings and samples that have recently entered the public domain.

“The exciting thing about this contest is that you don’t need fancy equipment; you can do it with a computer,” Gillaspy said. “I just love that there are so many opportunities available to take public domain music and create something new.” 

Creating the entry

In early January, after spotting an article about the annual contest in a campus publication, Robinson Center staff saw an opportunity.

“Part of our mission at the Robinson Center is to leverage all the expertise and the innovation at Notre Dame in the service of the community,” Clare Roach, associate director, said. “This competition was an authentic opportunity for kids to showcase their talent.”  

The contest was just another reason to get excited about the readers’ theatre project Robinson had already planned for Black History Month. Readers’ theatre is a strategy that helps students improve their reading skills by working together to read a script while focusing on their vocal expressions.    

“Our program strategy interweaves fun, engaging enrichment opportunities,” Roach said. “One of the big challenges of tutoring programs is retention. Kids go to school for a long day, and adding even more school support can be exhausting, but when you add in fun opportunities, our students want to come back. Readers’ theatre isn’t just fun theatre; it’s helping children become stronger readers by practicing again and again.”

Jennifer Jermano Miller, theatre and fine arts program director, who adapted the original book into parts, worked with the students to decide who would take each part.

“We sat them all down and asked, ‘Who wants to be a narrator or who wants to be Harriet?’” she said. “I don’t want to ask a student to do something they’re not comfortable with, so I really try to give them a lot of choices.”

On the musical side, AmeriCorps member and music teacher Emma Connors worked to teach the students the words to “Swing Low.”

“I just taught it one sentence at a time,” she said. “We do a lot of repeating. So, I’ll sing it, then they repeat it, and then I’ll speak the words so they can really internalize them. We just went back and forth until they were independently singing it.”

Repetition also helped students’ reading.

“We kept going again and again, but we got through it,” Dante said. “I was really happy because I didn’t think I could keep remembering the voice.”

Throughout the process, instructors worked with students to help them understand and use inflection as they spoke into the microphone. 

“Jennifer will teach things that are absolutely integral to reading, like ‘when you see a question mark at the end of a sentence, your voice tends to do what?’ Or what word in this sentence do you pause on? What word do you emphasize?” Roach said. “Strong readers have intuited a lot of these things; they can read out loud the way we talk.”

Siya, who described her character, Tubman, as “passionate, strong and fearless,” said she tried to portray that in her voice.

“I tried to be strong and ready to go and loud,” she said. “You could hear me all through your ears.”

And the winner is…

In the end, the three minutes of audio capturing the voices of students at the Robinson Center titled “Harriet Tubman Leads Her People To Freedom,” with a fourth-grader as Tubman and a fifth-grader as the voice of God, was one of five entries chosen as a 2026 contest winner.

“People choose where to put their time,” Gillaspy said. “It’s exciting that they chose us, and they did such a good job. I have shared the entry with several people, and they have all been so inspired by it. In the past, we have only had faculty, staff, and students enter; the kids had a certain way of viewing the world that is different from the others, and their entry was fantastic and lovely.”

To learn more and listen to all of this year’s contest winners, visit the 2026 contest page.