Introduction³

In 2023, we witnessed an intense educational debate in Spain about our recent history as public history (^{Demantowsky, 2018}). Firstly, because of the parliamentary processing and approval of the Democratic Memory Law, which, echoing European jurisprudence, considers historical revisionism to be a crime of denialism (^{Esquivel-Alonso, 2016}) and recognizes incitement to hatred against the victims of the Spanish War and Francoism as an attack on democratic principles. Secondly, it is hoped that the Royal Decrees that develop the curriculum of the LOMLOE, the new ^{Organic Law on Education 3/2020} that modifies that of 2006, will contribute to overcoming the equidistant account usual in Spanish history textbooks, which dismisses a traumatic and conflicted past (^{Díez-Gutiérrez, 2020}).

For years, ^{Pagès & González (2009}) have been calling for research into the Didactics of the Social Sciences to be added to the debates that have been taking place in Europe and Latin America since the end of the 20th century on Memory and the Teaching of History. However, the visions found among researchers in this area of knowledge (^{García-Morís & Diéguez-Cequiel, 2018}) and the political solid burden of this task, as well as the difficulty of approaching it, have lasted for decades, as research carried out in our context (^{Martínez-Rodríguez et al., 2022}) and on it from a perspective outside it (^{Magill, 2013}) has shown.

In this sense, our work wants to contribute to adding efforts to a long-delayed line of educational research, bringing to it the previous work on Education for Democratic Citizenship along the lines of the work of ^{Donnelly, McAuley, Blaylock, and Hughes (2021}). With this, we want to strengthen the work carried out in the HUM 856 Social and Citizenship Education Research Group, following previous work on teacher training in Historical and Democratic Memory (^{García-Ruiz et al., 2021}), as well as the impact of hate speeches and totalitarian populism among students of the same age (^{García-Ruiz, Zorrilla-Luque, & Razquin-Mangado, 2022})⁴ .

On this occasion, we address the effects that historical memory as a social and cultural practice has on future teachers when it comes to evaluating it critically (^{Bühl-Gramer, 2018}), bearing in mind that the cultural battle is based, like other relevant social issues, on populist hate speeches (^{Sant, 2021}), which flood the media and social networks in order to hide, omit or to deny those past events that corroborate the existence of murdered and tortured people, to erase them from the collective memory.

It has been proven in different political and geographical contexts that hate speech on social networks leaves its mark on the student population (^{Estellés & Castellví, 2020}), from which important educational implications are derived to overcome the emotional impact of approaching these issues in digital contexts and to tackle educational processes based on the development of critical thinking (^{Bhatt & MacKensie, 2019}).

We consider this especially necessary when we approach teaching and learning processes about a problematic and violent recent history (^{Epstein & Peck, 2017}). Firstly, because the conflicts of the present can become tools for learning about the past from critical literature (^{González-Monfort & Fernández, 2020}). Secondly, the potential of addressing hate speech in the classroom as relevant social problems has been demonstrated (^{Izquierdo-Grau, 2019}). Last but not least, history education is an education for the future that fosters the democratic culture of citizenship (^{Santisteban & Cerarols, 2014}).

We start from populism's premise in its discourse messages that question historical memory policies. In this way, it contributes to polarizing the public debate, generating currents of opinion that give rise to discourses of hatred based on duality: there are victims of Francoism because there were victims of the Republican band in the Spanish War (^{Tersch et al., 2020}). The research has been designed to present results in different publications and wants to analyze the narratives of teachers in training to know what emotional resorts and cognitive elements they use when analyzing the populist rhetoric that spreads discourses of hatred on social networks against the victims of the war caused by the uprising gang and Francoism. Our objectives are:

To know how subjectivities are created that guide thinking and interpreting relevant social problems such as conflicting pasts.

Become aware of what mechanisms are at play to mobilize historical knowledge and emotions.

Advancing that we can deconstruct the logic of populist hate speeches in the classroom by delving into critical digital literature.

In this article, we will focus on the first two objectives in order to understand the cognitive and emotional elements that come into play when confronting discourses of hatred against the victims of the Spanish War and the Franco dictatorship.

Methodology

The research is based on the sociocritical paradigm (^{Carr & Kemmis, 1986}). It arises from an interest in exploring the ideological dimension of teachers' opinions. The aim is to understand the meanings that future teachers give to historical knowledge when initiated into self-reflection and criticism of hegemonic discourses to generate changes in the city's historical culture. The epistemological position is consistent with the qualitative research to be carried out (^{Flick, 2015}), with selecting a case that responds to the aim of advancing a formative model in education in historical and democratic memory.

The sample was chosen based on convenience, responding to a group of thirty-one teachers in training for the Master's Degree in Secondary Education Teacher Training, Baccalaureate, Professional Training and Language Teaching, specializing in Economics, Business and Trade. The teacher in training requested the topic addressed, who, without being an expert on the subject, was aware of the public debate generated around the approval of ^{Law 20/2022}, of October 19, on Democratic Memory and its consequences for teacher decision-making. His interest in the subject arose from his attendance at one of the sessions of the 1st International Congress on Education in Historical and Democratic Memory, held at the University of Malaga in October 2022.

To address this concern, a training session was designed in the subjects 'Curriculum and Design and Development of Training Programmes and Activities', organized around the idea of the teacher as a critical curriculum agent (^{Apple, 1991}) who interprets the normative curriculum and organizes it around relevant social problems, past and present, approached from a transdisciplinary viewpoint. The majority age group is between 22 and 30, representing 40.22% of the sample. Born at the end of the 20th century, sixty years after the start of the war, the references to these past events are reminders of what they studied in the subject of the History of Spain. The rest of the participants are widely dispersed and aged between 31 and 48 years old, for whom the allusions to these events have a family link.

Debating relevant social problems and the possibility of bringing them into the classroom is a daily practice in the group. However, the majority opinion is that teachers should maintain a neutral position (^{Waldren, 2013}), thereby concealing a political stance. This idea is reinforced when subjects have political and ideological connotations, in which case they consider that teaching practice can guide students' thinking and fall into adoctrination. In order to break with this tendency, competences in democratic culture are worked on, mainly related to knowledge and critical understanding of the world, associated with the development of skills, attitudes and values (^{Giroux, 2013}). In this context, it is inappropriate for teachers to avoid political and ideological issues in the classroom; not addressing them is a form of taking sides. The idea of adoption is replaced by teachers' and citizens' responsibility to approach controversial topics with freedom and respect (^{Santisteban, 2019}). In this sense, the aim is to develop debates in which all positions and opinions can be heard without censoring opinions, as long as the purple line of respect for human rights is not crossed.

Following this approach, the instrument designed for the training session allows us to collect information of a sociological nature (age, gender, degree, ideology). It is based on questions and resources presented in an open-ended questionnaire organized around four areas to promote reflection by future teachers, with questions formulated for analysing resources and sources that link past and present. Firstly, they are asked about their historical knowledge, aiming to learn about their origins (Table 1).

Secondly, we were interested in the joint generation of reflections as teachers on the problems encountered in the classroom with the approach to the subject and as citizens in the face of a problematic past reinterpreted from the present (Table 2).

Finally, the last area aims to find out what they know about the victims of war, the hate speeches against them and the denial of events that violate human rights (Table 3). In short, to know what they think about the debate and public controversy surrounding historical and democratic memory. The aim was to differentiate accurate information from falsehoods, providing them with tools to detect, dismantle, and reject them as false while proposing an approach to hate speech.

The training session took place on February 13, 2023, the tenth class in the official calendar of subjects, and lasted two and a half hours. The chosen date connects the theme with a hidden local history to challenge them as teachers in training before the commemoration of the 86th anniversary of the massacre caused on the Malaga-Almeria highway. The civilian population leaving the city before the entry of the uprising troops represented a human column bombarded by Mussolini's Italian aviation and the Cervera, Canarias and Balearic cruisers, in which it is estimated that between 3,000 and 5,000 people could have died (^{Gómez-Villegas & García-España, 2020}).

The complementary instruments of the research have been recording the training session, the teacher's field notes, and the academic productions of the future teacher in the form of a class diary. This guarantees triangulation in data collection, providing highly relevant information with a high degree of relevance to the research subject.

We understand triangulation as a strategy that helps to create a complex system of interpretation from theoretical consistency to the logic of data analysis, as well as in the presentation of results. Emerging categories that arise from the academic elaborations of the teacher in training are established. However, we start from three central focuses that give meaning to the overall concept of the research: discursive strategies that move emotion and cognition, emotional bonds that bring them closer to or away from populist rhetoric, subjectivities that guide their way of thinking and interpreting historical content. In this article, we will focus on the first.

Following the ethical and credibility principles that qualitative research requires, the results will be differentiated and grouped by levels of understanding of the problem to facilitate analysis and comparison. It is presented with the support of the trainee teacher's narratives, reconstructing the structures that generate meaning and action to understand them from their discursive construction. The reproduction of the narratives is faithful to the words used by the participants; we have their consent, and acronyms have been assigned to the direct quotes from the participants' speeches.

Table 2 What do you think as a teacher in training and as a citizen?  

Areas	Questions	Resources
What do you think as a teacher in trainig	Can teaching the Recent History of Spain generate difficult situations in the classroom? Which is it?
	Do you think there are aspects of the recent history of Why is it better not to discuss them in class?
What do I think as a citizen?		Bañuelos de Bureba rural school (Burgos), by teacher Antoni Benaiges. Colored by Tina Paterson. Exhibition 'The color of Memory'
		Malaga road refugee shelter Almeria. Hazen Sise, National Library

Own elaboration.

Results and discussion

The results will focus on discursive strategies that move emotion and cognition due to the varied and rich information obtained with the different research instruments, especially the learning diary prepared by teachers in training. In order to meet the initial focus, we have taken into account in the analysis of their narratives that the discursive modes adopt, in the educational sphere, a deliberative character that operates at both a cognitive and emotional level, influencing the formation of social representations of both the pupil and the teacher. In this sense, we have followed ^{Breton (2007}), according to whom discursive strategies acquire two dimensions: the emotional one, which uses resources such as identification, seduction or repetition that can act on forgetfulness; the cognitive one, which uses strategies such as orientation in the interpretation of facts, the deformation of messages or the manipulation of information. Key elements appear in both dimensions, such as conformity to the story and identification with the idea or rejection, which can manifest in different ways.

Regarding the emotional dimension, we started from ^{Plutchik's (1988}) eight basic emotions to improve our understanding of teachers' narratives in training, considering the complexity of their identification and the difficulty of recognizing emotional awareness. About the cognitive dimension, we based ourselves on ^{Santisteban's (2010}) proposal for the formation of historical thinking skills related to the democratic formation of citizenship and based on four elements to which we add the absence of historical thinking:

Historical-temporal awareness: temporality (past, present, future), change-continuity (progress-continuity), connection to the future.

Historical imagination: empathy, contextualization, critical-creative thinking, moral judgment.

Historical representation: narration, causality-intentionality, events, scenarios.

Historical interpretation: sources (reading-processing), texts (contrast-confrontation), knowledge of historical work.

Absence of historical thinking.

The analysis of the reflections leads us to categorize their narratives into four groups: critical, humanitarian, equidistant and negationist (Table 4). This typology is built considering the ethical-political position from which the teacher draws their account. The starting point considered is the role of emotions in discursive construction and what feelings they move toward interest, confidence, optimism, sadness, or simply no emotions.

The critical and humanitarian narrative is linked to a sense of empathy and arouses interest in historical and democratic memory, focusing on the victims and their experiences, generating critical thinking that questions simplistic or distorted views of recent history. These narratives include references to the current war in Ukraine, establishing a relationship between the Spanish War and the current situation of the European crisis.

The equidistant and negationist narrative is related to an account lacking emotion, which describes the design and resources of the activity without any reflection on the historical events presented. A deficit description accompanies it without hinting at historical thinking, an effective way of not implicating oneself in a traumatic episode in our recent history.

The previous categories maintain interconnected relationships in which diverse emotions are mixed: interest in the issues presented, with the recognition of five students who say that they were unaware of these events; surprise that they were not addressed during any of their educational stages; sadness at events that they describe with adjectives such as unknown, complex, difficult, cold, tragic, painful, overbearing, heartbreaking, shameful, repulsive, truncated, indignant, impactful, regrettable; optimism and confidence also appear, as they believe that better society, based on respect and tolerance, is possible. Faced with this, all the narratives lacking emotion coincide in the same structure: they limit themselves to describing each activity in an aseptic manner, adopting an uncritical stance, not taking sides, and not expressing any personal opinions.

A detailed analysis of the narratives leads us to characterize three critical narratives (45% of the total) and two equidistant ones (41%), so we can determine that the sample is divided between those who adopt a critical stance, considering that it is necessary to know these events from our most recent past, against a similar group who, from their ethical-political distance, maintain a neutral attitude that they defend by relying on objectivity. It should be noted that one student is situated, in a nuanced way, in a negationist narrative, and another in a humanitarian one, to which it is added that two make no mention of the subject.

Something similar happens regarding emotions: teachers in training are divided between those who show them (52% of the total) and those who do not (48%), and a clear correspondence can be established with the following variable: historical thinking. In a nutshell, the presence of historical thinking is connected to the appearance of emotions, while their absence is related to the lack of historical thinking in the reflections.

55% of the narratives present historical thinking, of which 94% contain the variable historical imagination (empathy, contextualization, critical thinking), followed by historical interpretation with 81% (sources, contrast-confrontation, knowledge of historical work), historical awareness with 75% (temporality, past-present, change-continuity) and only 44% historical representation (narration, causality, events, scenarios). Notably, the four variables considered are present in ten teachers in training, representing 35% of all participating students, while historical thinking is absent in one hundred students, i.e. 38%.

The reflections that we situate as critical narrative present a high level of elaboration, with knowledge of the causes and consequences of the events represented, with an explanation of the arguments and critical analysis of both the information and the sources presented:

[...] they acted as if nothing had happened, but if it did happen, it truncated many people's lives, dreams and hopes, not just limited to them, but also to their families [AAB]. Aunque había dos bandos, para mí, víctimas son todos aquellos que fallecieron y sus familiares. Moreover, it is important to hear the testimonies of victims and their families so they do not fall into oblivion [AMA].

La narrativa humanitaria es una concreción de la crítica, pone el foco de atención en las penalidades que sufrió la población durante la Guerra de España, habla de víctimas, de vidas truncadas:

[...] no one likes to leave their home behind because of the situations they are faced with. Ahora pienso el miedo que pasaron esas familias, y que existen países que actualmente están pasando por esta misma situación, lo que en tu pequeño mundo parece que queda muy lejos, la realidad es que muchas familias tienen que huir de sus hogares y abandonar todo y pasar hambre, por lo que no, no está nada lejos, sino más presente de lo que pensamos, por lo que nos realmente podemos sentir muy agradecidos y afortunados por la vida que ha tocado vivir [OGM].

The equidistant narrative takes a distanced, neutral position towards historical memory and is characterized by the absence of emotions. Recurrent among teachers in training has been the idea that the training session has taken up much time, feeling that perhaps something could have been cut out by dedicating themselves to other tasks. This attitude is not contrary to the training they received. However, it does create a certain unease with the subject since they consider it to be disconnected from their teaching specialization:

From my point of view, the time spent on it has been too much... I am a bit overwhelmed with doing the big jobs. Therefore, I would prefer that we tackled other topics more related to the jobs... Perhaps less time should have been devoted to it in the MAES. It should be left as an activity in the virtual campus so that students who consider it appropriate and have an interest can access this material at home [CGA]; I think that the time spent on this activity has been somewhat excessive, as it has deviated a little from the pedagogical, curricular context of the Master [DCL].

The negationist narrative is reflected in a single teacher-in-training whom we consider to be fabricated; the very title of the entry to his learning diary shows this: "You cannot be seeing history permanently from the present [GRJ]". Trying to defend militant neutrality, he states that: "[...] on occasions in Spain double morality is used, that is, certain people are accredited to speak or carry out certain activities on certain subjects and others are not so much [GRJ]". He states that Spanish society, during the years of Franco's dictatorship, was divided into two groups, but that there was a subtle difference in terms of support: "[...] the Franco side was supported by many Spaniards and Spaniards and the Republican group also had its popular support [GRJ]". He has also resorted to freedom of expression to argue that there are different opinions, all of which are equally legitimate, but without questioning the argument being made, and that discursive coherence is enough to adopt this idea as true: "Llevándolo a la actualidad, habrá gente que esté a favor o en contra del gobierno actual, sin embargo, no debemos deslegitimar las opiniones y los puntos de vista de la persona que piensa diferente, siempre y cuando estén argumentadas y sean coherentes [GRJ]". The manic argument of not rethinking history, not rewriting it, which is made by the Spanish right, is well-founded in his reflection.

[...] I believe it is necessary to know Spain's historical reality objectively while considering the divergence in opinions because Spanish society was divided. On the other hand, I think it is appropriate not to look at history from today's perspective; after the dictatorial period, we entered a process of democratic transition in which the intention was to establish national security, and I do not think it is appropriate to dismantle or go much further into historical myths, because whether we like it or not, history is everything, not just one part [GRJ].

Regarding emotions, in all of them, we can find empathy with the victims and four teachers in training refer to direct family members who took part in the Spanish War:

Mi suegro... aunque no llegó a Almería, porque su familia decidió volver, sí recuerda ir amarrado con una cuerda a sus hermanos, el estruendo de las bombas, los gritos y carreras para buscar un refugio, de no saber cuándo iban a poder descansar, con la comida muy limitada [AAB].

Mi bisabuelo paterno fueilado durante la guerra civil en mi pueblo y sus restos se encuentran en una fosa común. Recently, a commemorative monument has been erected in the cemetery, where the names of all the people who are known to have been murdered in that pit appear [AMA].

Mi abuela me contómo cómo un tío suyo tuvo que esconderse en un falso techo en su casa porque lo perseguían porque un vecino denunció que era rojo, ese hombre tuvo que vivir el resto de su vida escondido en el techo de su casa, más bien sobreviviendo, porque eso no es vida, eso es malvivir para poder seguir vivo [AVA].

Me recuerda a mi historia familiar, ya que mi bisabuelo tuvo que huir y esconderse durante largos años de su vida [FRA].

In another five reflections, the lack of knowledge of the events is alluded to, among which we highlight: "My first feeling was of shame for not knowing about this circumstance, which took place not only here in Spain but also in my province, followed by sorrow and regret for all the victims and for all the people who had to go through that experience" [GDA].

The narratives in which no emotions appear, in which there are no feelings, tell objectively what the training session consisted of, as we can see: "Today we worked on a practice in class about historical memory; it was a dynamic with a questionnaire, videos, images, comments on social networks...[OGM]". We highlight GLB's reflection since emotion is absent until the moment when the teacher in training establishes a correspondence with the current situation in Ukraine:

It is regrettable that in the 21st century, we continue to experience this type of situation... I have to confess that in the face of this situation, I feel anger, sadness, and even fear because it is an aggression that is taking place very close to Spain [GLB].

About historical thinking, we began the presentation of results from the variables that have a more significant presence in the narratives of future teachers than those that have less. Historical imagination is reflected in reflections such as the following:

It was a shameful episode of the Spanish Civil War and one of the most unknown to society. It was ordered to fire on the civilian population. Then, this action was silenced throughout the post-war period because it did not suit the Francoist authorities to suppress it [BBA]. Everything we have dealt with today concerning the Civil War makes me think even more strongly that many people underestimate this war conflict and its aftermath. I was encouraged to read a fragment of what Queipo de Llano said on the radio to the class because I believe it is necessary to know and admit the barbarity of infusing terror into the population and believing such a message. Even if I do not hear his voice, I am still scared [JDV].

The variable historical interpretation focuses attention on the need to critically consider historical sources, with the requirement to contrast them, and focuses on the critical analysis of information while recognizing the value of the historical work process:

Another aspect that has surprised me is how the Vox deputy can affirm or deny certain things without proof, discrediting historians who have worked on the subject and distrusting the words of older people who tell of what happened [GRJ]. The VOX deputy's speech has been countered with the exact ideas and quotes by the presenter of the second video; in my opinion, hiding the truth will always be a political weapon. People who do not get informed and do not investigate will be left with the words that some people feed them and will never be able to know the truth [TPT]. Political ideology is taking center stage because extreme right-wing parties blame the deaths at this stage on a logistical failure or simply the exhaustion and hunger suffered by the people on the journey to Malaga. What is certain is that there is overwhelming evidence to show that real murders were carried out by the nationalist gang [CCA].

Historical-temporal awareness is expressed through arguments centered on change and historical continuity. The reflections establish continuous relationships between past and present, emphasizing that the events of the past are currently represented to us by the war in Ukraine:

Currently, I relate it directly to the flight of Syrian citizens, or more recently even Ukrainian refugees, to other European countries due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Moreover, how we keep repeating the mistakes of the past, over and over again [AMA], the image shown in class about that killing could be a current image because of the situation in Ukraine or the situation in Syria with thousands of refugees, which makes me think that life does not change, that in certain aspects humans have not advanced and that not so long ago we were in the same situation, so having empathy with those people is not an option. It is important to show the hardships during the civil war to teach us how they continue to take place, but kilometers from our territory, which is why help is essential [GDA].

Historical representation is the variable that is least covered in the reflections, perhaps due to the lack of historical training of the teacher in training, however, those in which it appears to use the causality of the events covered in the training session:

The Desbandá de Málaga was an attack on civilians by the rebels during the Spanish Civil War on February 8, 1937, when Francoist troops entered Málaga. It is estimated that some 300,000 left. They arrived in Almería on the 13th, just like today, after 7 days on the road, with 3 boats bombarding them [FRA]. It seems so important to me to know the reality of history, to know what happened, why and its consequences, not just to study it in books, to listen to real accounts, because that is what is silent, to hear first-hand what these people suffered so much, the theory is perfect. However, it is also very important that in class, we see videos like the one we saw today in this questionnaire, real accounts, so that they know that history is not far away and that these events can happen again [SVA].

Following on from the comments made by the deputy leader of the VOX political party in Congress, we can see how many times, with ideology as a banner, they try to sell false ideas or malicious lies to the people, who often buy them out of political thinking, as we can see from the tweets displayed, where respect for the victims was lacking, something that I find repulsive. The idea that 'La desbandá' was a humanitarian catastrophe, an improvisation by the Republican gang and that the people who died were militiamen is nonsense, even more so after hearing how survivors of the incident narrate what happened and how photos or written documents deny the certainty of this discourse. I have already spoken in other sections about how the truth is transformed for personal gain and how we must train ourselves not to believe the first thing we hear, but I would like to emphasize that the teaching of critical thinking and the investigation of data due to exposure to these arguments is currently key in the classroom [GDA].

This case study has allowed us to look at the narratives teachers use in training to think and reflect on historical and democratic memory and how they can build historical thinking from their emotions. Thinking and rethinking recent history from a critical literacy perspective builds an active, participatory citizenry in constructing a democratic society based on freedom, justice and tolerance. However, relevant social issues, such as the one that concerns us, continue to give rise to certain reservations on the part of teachers in training who consider that being politically significant may pose difficulties and consider that neutrality and political-ideological equidistance should be a goal to be followed as future teachers, thus avoiding controversial issues for simple professional convenience:

I feel a bit disappointed. I've always seen that we're a very participative group in any debate during the Master's, but in this particular debate, I've seen many comments about participating in it. I think this may be due to the political tendencies many people continue to see in this issue of democratic memory [AMA].

However, another prominent sector of this teaching profession believes that education in values must be present in every teacher's daily performance, regardless of their speciality in their educational centre. They do not shy away from positioning themselves as citizens and teacher-educators; making decisions and standing up for human rights cannot be an option but an obligation.

Regarding the Democratic Memory Law, those who speak out defend it and are committed to continuing to deepen its spirit: recovering the memory of the victims, justice and reparation, so the guard cannot be lowered, the hopes it has generated in sectors of Spanish society cannot fade away due to inanition on the part of the public authorities:

That is why the Historical Memory Law established measures such as the removal of Francoist symbols, the exhumation of communal graves, and the investigation of the atrocious crimes of war against humanity that took place in the country produced. However, like any law, it needs funding to be carried out, so the struggle is not over and requires a firm commitment from all institutions to bring attitudes closer to understanding because our society is democratic. We all have the same rights and obligations and seek to achieve justice, truth and justice for all [AAB]. Historical memory is an issue that has consistently generated much controversy and continues to divide people who have suffered a civil war... Everyone has the right to remember their dead, and this is the ultimate goal of historical memory, to know where the victims of the war and Francoism are, because senseless deaths did not end on April 1, 1939, at that moment, another stage of terror began, during which everyone who went against the directives imposed by Francisco Franco was persecuted, searched for, tortured, imprisoned, executed and buried in communal graves without a place on the map [AAB].

AMA refers to the social polarization that this issue generates and even points out that:

[...] there is nothing to think that it will not happen again in Spain (a war conflict) in the face of the political polarization that we are currently experiencing, marked by political extremism... The events will always be questioned since there will always be a group who will think that what is being tried with the remembrance of the victims is to sow hatred and sectarianism. Moreover, there will always be groups who will try to create hate speeches [AMA].

He considers that hate messages can continue, but it is important to deconstruct them through narratives based on truthful and contrasted information; in the face of interested disinformation, critical literacy processes are needed to disarm false constructions with data.

In this vein, several teachers in training place the center of their reflections on the role of the teacher, who must adopt with their students the construction of critical thinking centered on the analysis, valuation and reflection of information, enabling them to differentiate opinions from information, contrasting sources and reaching reasoned conclusions:

I have also become aware that political parties distort history, but the truth must be known since we are in a society in which people lie a lot; it is difficult to disprove everything that is said; it is very cynical; we must investigate the truth and not believe everything that is said, we must develop this critical thinking and analysis of information. As teachers, we must ensure that students develop these skills, do not believe everything they are told, and know how to investigate reality [OLV]. It is also very important that we help them to develop critical thinking and that they question the information they receive, as in the case of the VOX deputy that we had seen, and that is that not by telling a lie does it become the truth, but sometimes those who hear it can take it as such without even questioning it and that is a serious mistake [RLR]. It is key to promote young people's critical thinking and ability to question reality, contrast information, develop hypotheses and make decisions as critical and active citizens [BBA].

Some teachers in training are so interested in the subject that they have delved deeper into the issue, expressing themselves in the following way:

In addition, I was enormously surprised to learn that where a huge, bright and colourful shopping mall in Malaga now stands, there used to be a concentration camp. I think my colleagues were just as stunned as I was. We have not seen it in class; we have not been able to visit it, and it has been destroyed, along with the memory of the more than 4,000 people who passed through it. I did not know the detail that a testimony bank could be found in the Malaga City Council. I searched for it and found a Malaga Provincial Oral Memory Fund video presentation. Sometimes, it is hard for me to believe that this happened in my country, on the same ground that I walk on, in the same streets that I walk along and that my ancestors lived through it [JDV].

The evaluation of the training session has been, in general terms, very positive by the future teacher, highlighting the following:

It seems very useful material to incorporate into lessons since the contents are relevant and help us learn about our past better to understand our present in our society [VMA]. I can say that this activity with so many different didactic resources (images, tweets, videos...) has given me a huge practical application for a classroom and could be aimed at any stage and age, so I would love to design a similarly effective and reflective activity in the future that has such a defined objective and helps to teach the importance of knowing our past [GDA].

Conclusion

In this article, we have focused on the first two objectives outlined in the research: to understand how subjectivities are created to guide the way of thinking and interpreting relevant social problems as pasts in conflicts; to become aware of what mechanisms are at play to move historical knowledge and emotions. With this, we want to understand the cognitive and emotional elements that come into play when teachers in training are faced with discourses of hatred against the victims of the Spanish War and the Franco dictatorship.

We found that one way of not signifying oneself politically or ideologically is to construct a narrative devoid of emotion so that an equidistant position on controversial social issues manifests as a neutral discourse. We found this out because, during the development of the subjects in which the training session was held, a group of teachers in training held positions close to the postulates defended by VOX, the ultra-right-wing party in Spain, questioning the Democratic Memory Law. The analysis of his narratives indicates that he does not reproduce his ideas in academic elaborations, which are adulterated in empty generalizations of negationist premises. In future research, it would be worth analyzing how we can make these ideas emerge without the self-censorship of those who maintain them to know the causes preventing them from being expressed openly to foster democratic debate.

The results obtained following cultural studies indicate that the sociocultural component of emotions uses discursive strategies (^{Wodak, 2000}) that use language following an organized or objective action plan. In this case, this is to create an emotional community through identification processes (^{Macleod & Marinis, 2019}) from humanist positions; in others, it is to deepen knowledge of the facts or phenomena that are the object of knowledge from a critical stance.