“Looking at ourselves takes time”: youth listening in vocational and technological education

Abstract

This article aims to listen to narratives of life and school persistence of a young Black (self-identified) student from the working class in Vocational and Technological Education (VTE), enrolled in the Technical Program in Secretarial Studies Integrated with Secondary Education at the Federal Institute of Mato Grosso (IFMT). It establishes an analytical dialogue with a previous study conducted with a female student from the same institution. The methodology employed is Testimonial Oral History, conducted through interviews. The analysis is grounded in an intersectional perspective of gender, race, and class, anchored in Saffioti's (2015) “loose knot” matrix, with an emphasis on Black masculinities. The results indicate that while the female trajectory is intersected by patriarchal violence and the burden of domestic work, the male trajectory reveals symbolic violence, racialization, and feelings of non-belonging in educational spaces marked by social distinctions. It concludes that persistence in VTE is configured as an intersectional process, in which boldness emerges, from the listening of youth narratives, as a practice of resistance to the hierarchies of gender, race, and class that regulate bodies and belongings.