Children's literature: artistic expression that sets elderly characters in motion

The current circumstances of an aging population and the complexity of socioeconomic, technological, and cultural shifts, stimulate the need for the Brazilian education system to read a world impregnated with a new phenomenon: the diversity of ways of living at the old age. Children need to read this aging world whilst participating in intergenerational experiences within their communities in order to avoid ageism. Subsequently, the thematic focus of this study is children's literature. Our methodology foresees a bibliographical research incorporating the following goals: the sampling of works found under the banner of children's literature, which include elderly characters and are available in Portuguese; the establishment of correlations between publishers, where they are located, and the number of books they published, between the works and their year of publication, and also between gender, ethnicity, and the usage of specific adjectives and verb tenses; and the envisagement of a geroliteracy. The questions posed by our research were as follow: Which titles of the investigated works incorporate elderly characters? Does children's literature hold within itself the potential for constructing knowledge about old age? How can literary language be an educational tool for geroliteracy? The results revealed that the literary artistic expression is presented through theme-conveying titles that not always unveil the age diversity in a single work. It can be concluded that sharing different works that bring elderly characters in children's literature, as an educational tool, can enhance, in children, the construction of new concepts of old age, since it is through language that thoughts and feelings are expressed.