Gerontological Awareness for the Teaching-scientific Work of Foreign Language Teachers with Senior Citizens

• Autor(a) principal: Ribeiro de Moraes-Caruzzo, Vivian Nádia
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: de Oliveira, Victor César
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Tear: Revista de Educação Ciência e Tecnologia
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ifrs.edu.br/index.php/tear/article/view/6641

This article aims to present the theoretical-methodological construction of the concepts of Gerontological Awareness in order to defend its importance for foreign language teachers for senior citizens. Recognizing, in our teaching-scientific work, the limitations of professionals to work in such field, we narratively present our experiences in promoting interventionist actions in the form of workshops and lectures in university spaces with Language and Literature undergraduate students. Our research path evidences the development of theoretical-practical constructs throughout our interventionist work, which aligned with the concept of Educational Gerontology and the strategies to combat ageism related to ageism presented by the World Health Organization, reveal themselves as important and necessary. Furthermore, our observations point to the growth of investigative and professional interest of foreign language teachers in training, who participated in our Gerontological Awareness interventions, on teaching-learning experiences with/by elderly people. We then discuss the hypothesis that the lack of approximation of (future) language education professionals with discussions and reflections on old age (as a natural stage of life) and aging (as a multifactorial process) make elderly learners of languages invisible, corroborated by the narrative of our experiences in continuum. Keywords: Gerontological Awareness. Language Teaching. Old Age.