Abstract
This article deals with the views on national identity and the models of national narrative which are assumed by secondary school pupils and trainee history teachers. We examine the degree to which the participants’ opinions correspond either to a social representation/master narrative or to a narrative which understands national identities and nations as social constructs. We analyse the influence of history teaching and extra-curricular dimensions of socialization (the media) on the construction of these opinions. This is a qualitative study of a phenomenological nature, based on open questionnaires and the writing of texts on the subject of history, carried out on samples of university students and trainee teachers. The study was carried out in two separate phases. The initial phase consisted of exploring the subjective representation of national identity by analysing differences according to age, whereas the second stage looked closely at the discourse of students undergoing initial teacher training regarding the history of Spain in order to investigate what elements were predominant in their narrative. The qualitative methodology is set in the context of grounded theory and employs discourse analysis. The results show the predominance of essentialist representations of national identity and the influence of a master narrative. No significant differences were found as far as age or the level of training in history is concerned. The predominant model reflects similarities with those shown in historically-based television series.
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