The Teaching guide on Republican Exile in North Africa based on the documentary “The Last Train to Bouarfa” (Figure 1) is an educational proposal published in 2024 by Alba Maria Boix, Carlos Fuertes and Néstor Banderas, members of the SOCIAL(S) Research Group¹ of the Universitat de València. The guide is based on the audiovisual work The Last Train to Bouarfa², directed by Rosa Brines, which tells the story of a family from Banyeres de Mariola (l’Alcoià, Alacant) who journey to the Moroccan desert to recover the body of their grandfather, who died in 1940 during his exile on the African continent. This work constitutes teaching material of high socio-educational interest that addresses, as a cross-cutting theme, the migration process that occurred after the Civil War and during the Franco dictatorship. Similarly, the educational richness is enhanced by addressing the subject from a more complete perspective focused on the people who were forced to seek refuge in Africa. This allows students to move away from a reductionist reading and broaden their view of the recent historical past by going beyond studying it only in relation to France and South America.

The guide is structured in four main points in which various activities are proposed based on the documentary. First, before the video is played, a series of gradual and guided questions are asked (dossier, pp. 13) to determine the students’ previous knowledge. A geographical map taken from the comic Los surcos del Azar (Roca, 2013) is used to help students geographically locate the main destinations of the Republicans who crossed the Spanish borders after the conflict that began with the failed military coup.

Second, the 28-minute documentary, mentioned above, is viewed together in the classroom. Third, after viewing the short film, four activities are presented under the title “Analysing the documentary” (dossier, pp. 21-25), and which focus on the different topics covered in Rosa Brines’ production. These tasks aim to explore how Republican exile is presented in school textbooks, comparing this with the multimedia presentation to see what approaches are taken and what gets the most attention. The material also emphasizes the importance of democratic memory and exhuming those who were executed and disappeared under Franco’s regime, allowing students to analyse these issues through current laws and make ethical assessments. Additionally, questions and resources are provided for a thorough study of the Stanbrook, the British ship that conducted the final refugee evacuation from Alacant to Oran, carrying the resident from Banyeres along with other exiles. Finally, as we observe in Figure 2, a variety of tasks are presented to analyse the work camps in Africa based on their conditions, resistances and objectives.

The last block incorporates six activities called “Beyond the documentary” (dossier, pp. 29-37). This block encourages students to look in more depth at the consequences of exile without forgetting those who remained under the control of the dictatorial regime, as well as establishing parallels with contemporary migratory movements. These activities therefore address issues such as the repressive purification processes focused on teachers, the concentration camps of the Spanish State and the situation in which women and children were left with the Franco dictatorship. The teaching resource also considers the evacuation of children who went into exile, the subsequent return of refugees to their homeland, the treatment of memory in other countries of the world and the guided viewing of the documentary Encontres d’Exili, which compares the accounts of people who fled repression at the end of the war in 1939 and the refugees who are currently arriving in Valencia. Working with this content allows us to incorporate the experiences of all citizens and obtain more complete, diverse and equitable learning to achieve a general, but detailed, study of historical events.

Overall, the tasks presented contribute to obtaining an in-depth vision of the experiences of Republican exile in North Africa as well as the context in which it took place. The learning approach is based on grassroots history that examines forced labour, childhood, women, everyday life, and contemporary issues. It adopts a sociocultural historical perspective that helps transform traditional school approaches and gives attention to all historical actors by making marginalized groups visible. This comprehensive knowledge-building is strengthened by the diverse range of resources the educational guide uses, applied in ways that encourage critical thinking and questioning. The resources, presented from a critical standpoint, relate to students’ interests and ways of communicating, which helps increase their enthusiasm for history. The materials include primary written sources (personal diaries and witness accounts), visual sources (photographs and comics), audiovisual sources (documentaries and songs), Law 20/2022 for examining legislation about searching for missing people, and school textbooks for critical analysis of their content.

At the same time, it is important to highlight that this educational material includes detailed, time-coded tables organized by themes for both the main documentary and the second one mentioned. This allows teachers to pause at the right moments to guide their students’ viewing experience. Similarly, when watching the video about ‘Temporal Trajectories: Exile Yesterday and Today’, specific time-stamped segments are linked to questions that engage students and can be used to start activities or discussions, as we can see in Figure 3. These guidelines are incredibly valuable tools that help teachers mediate the learning process, guiding students toward questioning the resource and understanding its meaning.

Thus, the guide offers a complex approach based on both the diversity of content and resources and the excellent and open didactic structure. Along these lines, the proposed activities are adaptable because they don’t have to be completed in their entirety. They can be used in the classroom without following the suggested timeline and can be tailored to each group, since teachers decide which tasks to choose and how to implement them in class. This flexibility gives educators, who are the intended audience for this work, materials to explore through primary sources one of the most overlooked and forgotten topics in the study of recent Spanish history.

This approach by Boix, Fuertes and Banderas is appropriate for the fourth year of high school and the second year of post-compulsory studies (sixth year of high school), as these levels specifically study the period between 1931 and 1982. However, this resource is an essential teaching tool for working on the issue of exile in all high school classrooms because, faced with a socio-political context that blames the Second Republic for the Civil War and trivializes Franco’s dictatorship (Fuertes & Parra, 2023, pp. 9-10), it is necessary to bring these approaches into the classroom to offer a more nuanced perspective that moves away from focusing primarily on political and economic processes, and instead centres on the history of ordinary people, their lived experiences, and the population movements that occurred. Ultimately, this should help build critical and engaged historical thinking.

At the same time, these materials make a significant contribution to combatting the hate speech that is widespread in society and internalized by many teenagers, since they offer a comparative perspective between the Republican exile to Africa under Franco’s regime and the current migration of African people arriving in Spain. In a context marked by the rise of reactionary ideologies and, consequently, increased xenophobic behaviours that reject population movements from the African continent, it is necessary to address and introduce controversial historical topics like immigration into classrooms, although these topics can be uncomfortable within a history curriculum accustomed to embracing distant and glorious pasts (González Amorena, 2014, p. 20).

In conclusion, the activities, resources, and materials presented in this educational guide based on the documentary The Last Train to Bouarfa have great potential for carrying out a comprehensive teaching and learning process about Republican exile in North Africa. It is also an outstanding guide due to its clarity, coherence, and practical applicability. Implementing it in classrooms is both essential and necessary today for building a more critical, just, democratic, and inclusive society that examines its past through a focus on democratic memory, the repression carried out by the dictatorial regime, and the situation women were relegated to.