From Country Music to Core Values

What can the life of a country music star teach fourth and fifth graders about the values they practice at school? In Dani Barkat’s Integrated Inquiry class, that question became the starting point for a lesson in honor of Dolly Parton and her influence and impact in American culture. 

Integrated Inquiry invites students to ask big questions, think deeply, and look for connections across subjects, genres, time periods, and their own experiences. Some questions may not have clear answers. Students learn that it is okay to sit with uncertainty, trust their ideas, and share those ideas with others. The goal is to recognize that learning does not happen in separate boxes: a story encountered in one class can change how we understand something in another, or how we act beyond school. 

While our 4th/5th grade students have the opportunity to explore these ideas in a unique class, integrated learning, deep thinking, and big questions are at the heart of a PJA education from infants through 8th grade.

At the start of the year, shortly after Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, students explored where she came from, the life she built, and the many ways she affected others. They considered how her actions reflected the PJA middot—our core values—in the wider world. Her efforts to bring books to children, for example, gave students a way to think about kehillah (community): What does it look like to care for people we may never meet? Or hodaya (appreciation): How can appreciation for the opportunities we have inspire us to share them? Or limmud (study): What can we do to provide greater access to all who want to learn?

One connection brought the lesson especially close to home. Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library mails free books to young children to help nurture a love of reading. After hearing Dolly speak about the program, Harold Grinspoon was inspired to create PJ Library, which sends free Jewish children’s books to Jewish families. Many PJA students have grown up with those books in their homes.

The fourth and fifth graders made flyers to share the connections they found between Dolly’s life and the middot. Their work shows what Integrated Inquiry makes possible: one person’s story can lead to questions about music, literacy, generosity, Jewish life, and the choices we make for our own communities