Culture, diversity and deconstruction of prejudices in schools 1

According to this approach, as individuals internalize social messages, they are always active or constructive to different degrees (Valsiner, 2014; 2021), so what is thought to be transmitted is, in fact, somehow transformed by the developing person. Instead of the illusory notion of "transmission" we should refer to the processes of knowledge co-construction that occur as teachers and students communicate within their classrooms. [...]the traditional, monological concept of transmission relates to attempts to simply impose values and knowledge from a vertical, non-dialogical perspective, to reproduce an authoritarian social order enforced by the system. [...]the objective of the present investigation was to identify and analyze cultural and pedagogical practices as well as theoretical concepts that may help to analyze processes conducive to possible deconstructions of prejudices throughout specific activities proposed and developed by one specific project named as "Respect" (fictitious name), implemented in an Elementary public school in Brazil. According to cultural psychology, practices and values construct each other as time goes by, and the role of human values, or hypergeneralized affective-semiotic fields (Branco, 2018; Valsiner, 2021), is fundamental to make sense of processes of meaning construction and human development. According to the Affective Semiotic Regulatory Model proposed by Valsiner (2014, 2021), cultural psychology conceives values and prejudices as hypergeneralized affective-semiotic fields that ultimately guide human perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and actions (Branco, 2018).