In the conclusions from the study, Martí Domínguez points that many students manifested a big surprise, perplexity and even shock when discovering familiar episodes that had been kept in silence during decades, most of the time for fear, embarrassment or transgenerational trauma. “This intergenerational silence evidences to which extent politic repression continued being part of the collective memory long after the formal end of the Francoist system” explains the professor of the Universitat de València.

The article by Martí Domínguez, published in Media Practice and Education, gets into the study of social perception of historical memory among Journalism students, “a collective that will soon have a fundamental paper in the building of the public review and transmission of historical knowledge”. With the purpose of doing the research, students were proposed to elaborate an opinion essay based on a personal experience linked to their family historical memory. Specifically, they had to think about the coup d’état of 1936, Spanish Civil War and the posterior Francoist dictatorship. The resulting corpus, formed by a total of 83 articles, puts on manifest a generalised ignorance about this historical period.

At the same time, redacted texts by his students reflect a attitude of deep introspection. In many cases, reflections take a literary, poetic or emotive character, showing not only a historical volunteer comprehension, but also a personal necessity of understanding themselves inside the familiar short story marked by the fracture, suffering or resistance. Through this exercise the memory becomes an instrument of self-discovery and, at the same time, of reconciliation with the past.

According to Domínguez, “this type of pedagogical activity is specially valuable in the journalism area, as it promotes a critical and empathetic view towards history and towards the narratives that constitute it”. For the professor of the University, the future journalists not only will have the responsibility of informing, but also explaining the past in a way that allows society to comprehend each other better and avoid repeating mistakes. “In this sense, historical memory is not only a simple academic exercise, but a civic and democratic tool of first degree”, he adds.

For the researcher, this process makes students conscious of the big memory lapses existing in the knowledge of this period, both at an educational and family level. This way, ignorance not only affects objective events, but also intimal experiences that conform the memory of the families.

This phenomena is not exclusive of Spain. “In many contemporary societies, specially those that have lived a dictatorship, civil wars or traumatic processes of political transition, the recovery of the families from familiar memory can play a fundamental role in the building of a collective entity more inclusive and mature”, points out, and adds “get to know the past is a necessary condition in order to practice a critical, informed and compromised citizenship with justice and truth”.

Reference

Domínguez, M. (2025). ‘Don’t look back! Educational perspectives on the management of family history memory among Spanish journalism students’. Media Practice and Education, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/25741136.2025.2491197