FOREIGN BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARIES OF EDUCATORS: CREATION CONCEPTS AND CONTENT FEATURES

Abstract

The article considers foreign experience in creating biographical dictionaries of educators. The table presents 8 dictionaries published in Australia, Great Britain, Italy and the USA in 1978-2021. The content of each dictionary is analyzed according to the following parameters: number of authors, structure, number and volume of articles, distribution of articles by gender, scheme of biographical article, availability of appendices.
 It has been found that the dictionaries published in the 1970s and 1990s in the Great Britain and the USA were created according to the established scientific tradition: short biographical articles (up to 500 words), with theorists, practitioners and administrators of education, as well as philosophers and psychologists predominating among the personalities. An exception is the bio-bibliographic sourcebook published in the USA in 1994, which is the first publication devoted exclusively to women educators and contains extensive biographical articles. Instead, biographical dictionaries of educators published in the 2010s and early 2020s demonstrate new methodological approaches to both the selection of individuals and the creation of the dictionary: 1) the Italian biographical dictionary of educators (2013), in addition to educational theorists and practitioners, presents founders and heads of educational institutions of various types, editors of pedagogical periodicals, children's writers and illustrators of books for children, theorists and popularizers of physical and sports education, leaders of youth associations, etc, 2) the concepts of creating an Australian dictionary of Catholic educators (2020) and an encyclopaedia of modern Asian educators (2021) include a division into sections with introductory review articles on the development of education in a particular historical period.
 A generalized scheme of a biographical article about an educator is presented. The features of the content of dictionaries are highlighted. The prospects of using foreign experience in the creation of an encyclopaedic biographical dictionary of educators of Ukraine are determined: creating a more objective and complete list of educators whose biographies will be included in the dictionary, improving the scheme of writing a biographical article, introducing appendices into the structure of the dictionary.