Sonja Thomsen & Adam Carr
Re: Listening To Mitchell, Public Art Project
Dear Ms. Thomsen & Mr. Carr,
We are excited to support your public art installation Listening to Mitchell and your collaboration with students at Allen Field Elementary. Allen-Field Elementary is an elementary school on the near South Side (located at 730 W. Lapham). Respectively, we are a 3rd grade teacher with a class of 17 students and a reading specialist that serves students.
We first learned about Listening to Mitchell through our partnership with Arts@Large. Through Arts@Large, we are participating in an arts education incubator that will culminate in a museum installation entitled Immigration Through the Eyes of a Child. Through this process, we learned about Listening to Mitchell, a project that has deep resonance with our classroom project.
Working with you two since the beginning of March has been an invaluable experience for our students. The series of workshops about the interview and documentation process you’ve implemented have been incredibly helpful for our museum project. We are interested in how you look to empower the students to engage in personal oral histories. Additionally, we are excited to involve our students and their families with Listening to Mitchell, specifically your proposal to make our students stewards of the project and lead tours of visiting adults and families. We are also excited about the potential of our students and their families being part of your interview process. We hope our collaboration extends into the fall of next school year, either with our students or in other Allen-Field classrooms implementing the museum project.
Sincerely,
German Diaz & Martha A. López
Allen-Field Elementary School
The Making of Listening to Mitchell 