Choral singing in a social movement as a tool of adult education: ‘Warszawianka 1905’ as a teacher

Aleksandra Hołubowicz; Piotr Kowzan

doi:10.3384/rela.2000-7426.6261

Authors

Aleksandra Hołubowicz University of Hradec Králové https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1430-3259
Piotr Kowzan University of Gdansk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6506-8327

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3384/rela.2000-7426.6261

Keywords:

adult education, choral singing, social movements, pedagogy of redundancy, strategic deep andragogy

Abstract

This paper examines how choral singing functions as a site of adult education within social movements through a case study of ‘Warszawianka 1905’ as performed by the Prague Revolutionary Choir. Combining dialogical autoethnography, new-materialist diffractive analysis, and autophenomenography, we conceptualise the song as actant, historical witness, and teacher. We propose a ‘pedagogy of redundancy’, i.e., the use of purposeful cycles of listening, choral recitation, rhythmic chanting, humming, and iterative performance which lowers shame, builds affective and social reserves, while enabling translanguaging, improvisation, and rapid public uptake. Framed as ‘strategic deep andragogy’, we offer a 4R heuristic: Repeat, Relax, Reframe, Resound, showing how the collective voice binds bodies, memories, and political imagination across languages and generations. Productive tensions between nostalgia/critique and canonisation/improvisation animate identity work. In addition, we note the limits of a single-song regional focus and outline pathways for comparative research.

Author Biographies

Aleksandra Hołubowicz, University of Hradec Králové

Aleksandra Hołubowicz earned her doctoral degree in literary studies at Gdansk University, Poland. Her dissertation was published in 2023 as A Comparative Study of Selected Texts by Contemporary US Latina/Chicana and Polish Women Writers by P. Lang. She received her MA in American Studies, University of Warsaw, and BA in English Philology: Teaching English as a Second Language also in Gdansk. For many years she worked as a teacher of English and Civics in Poland at different types of schools. She also taught American literature at Gdansk University and was also involved in various educational projects concerned with literature and language offered to the general public. She came to the Czech Republic for a CEEPUS exchange to work on her PhD and between 2018-2024 she worked as an English teacher at Charles University, Faculty of Arts. Her current postdoctoral project at Faculty of Education of UHK focuses on transformative pedagogy and how it can be applied while teaching language and literature.

Piotr Kowzan, University of Gdansk

Piotr Kowzan is assistant professor at the Institute of Education at the University of Gdańsk's Department of Didactics and Education of Adults. In his research, he focuses on learning in social movements and children's participation in protests, as well as migration and financial education in contexts of crisis. He carried out research in countries like Poland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. He teaches future educators about topics such as organising cooperation, teacher development, and global education.

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