Essay from Sevara Kuchkarova

Young Central Asian woman with dark hair and a white collared shirt in front of a bunch of books with green covers on a wooden shelf. She's in a white dress shirt and white pants.

Methods to Enhance Motivation in the Educational Process 

Introduction 

Motivation is the internal and external drive of students toward the learning process, directly impacting their success and knowledge level. Based on Self-Determination Theory, “autonomy,” “competence,” and “social connections” play a crucial role in strengthening motivation. Motivation serves as a key driver in the educational process, determining students’ engagement, goal achievement, and success.

Methods to Enhance Motivation

1 Educational Methods

Flipped Classroom: Students study material in advance, while classroom time is dedicated to practical activities, aligning with the ARCS model and boosting motivation.Active Learning: Through methods like peer learning, problem-based learning, and cognitive apprenticeship, students work independently and collaboratively.

2 Psychological Approaches

Autonomy and Choice: When students choose their own materials, their intrinsic motivation increases (Self-Determination Theory).

Conclusion

Motivation in education is enhanced by harmonizing internal factors (autonomy, interest, social connections) and external factors (awards, badges, competition). The effectiveness of inquiry-based learning and active learning has been confirmed by research. Autonomy and reflection guide students toward intrinsic motivation rather than reliance on external factors. Such approaches make lessons meaningful, engaging, and beneficial for both students and educators.

Sevara Kuchkarova is a 3rd year student of Bukhara State Pedagogical Institute.

Poetry from Boboqulova Durdona

Central Asian teen girl with dark black braids, an embroidered headdress, and a white collared shirt with a black and white patterned vest.

The Lament of Palestine
Bukhara region, Karakul district, School No.1, 8th grade student

Mother, don’t look to the sky — look from the heavens,
Every dawn now spills blood, no longer light.
Children weep, but the ears remain deaf,
The world is silent — as if it sees no sight.

The earth trembles, yet it is no quake,
This is a lightning that makes hearts shake.
Not cannonballs, but bullets hit the young,
And in a mother’s embrace, the world shut its eyes.

Peace never came to rest upon your roof,
Between the calls to prayer, screams echo loud.
Instead of flowers, heavy stones are placed,
On the grave — dewdrops of blood drip down.

At night, no angels visit in dreams,
But fear enters, dressed in black.
The dream to live has long been buried,
There’s no support left — not even in prayers.

Dr. Maja Herman Sekulic reviews Dr. Jernail S. Anand’s work

Various book covers from Dr. Jernail Singh Anand. Images range from a lake with beaches and trees to historical statues of scholarly old men to fire and monsters to silhouettes of people in a futuristic city. Middle aged European woman with a pearl necklace, black and white scarf, and black top and blonde hair and earrings holding a microphone. Image of the author, an older South Asian man in a purple suit, red tie, and burgundy turban standing and reading from one of his books.

JERNAIL S. ANAND: THE MASTER OF MYTH CREATION

“Craza, a bold evolution from Lustus”

Dr Maja Herman Sekulic

Dr. Jernail Singh Anand is a towering literary figure whose work [an opus of 180 books] embodies a rare fusion of creativity, intellect, and moral vision. Anand won the Seneca Award [Italy], Charter of Morava [Serbia], Franz Kafka [Germany, Ukraine and Chek Rep.] and Maxim Gorky [Russia]. His name adorns the Poets’ Rock in Serbia and stands tall as the greatest philosopher among poets, and the greatest poet among philosophers.  Dr. Anand’s grandiose work ‘Epicasia’ [June 2025], includes twelve epic narratives, which was dedicated to “the Land of Serbia and its brilliant daughter Dr Maja Herman Sekulic” [the author].  

The creation of neo-mythological characters like Lustus and now Craza in The Alternate Universe establishes Dr. Anand  as a master of myth creation, blending traditional epic forms with modern existential, philosophical, and socio-political concerns, and resonates with both Eastern and Western literary traditions.  Traditional mythology served to explain natural phenomena through divine or heroic figures. But Anand’s Neo-mythology brings up new archetypes to address contemporary concerns such as moral erosion, the rise of artificial intelligence and corporate evil.

According to Grok, Dr. Anand’s The Alternate Universe is an audacious and thought-provoking epic that masterfully intertwines science fiction, technology, and spirituality to explore the existential crises facing humanity in an AI-driven era. As his 13th epic, this work showcases Anand’s ability to weave a complex narrative that challenges conventional boundaries between the divine, the human, and the technological. The epic is both a speculative vision of a re-engineered humanity and a philosophical critique of mankind’s moral and spiritual decay, making it a significant contribution to contemporary literature. It is intriguing to enter into Anand’s mind through his epics. The entire space is occupied by ethereal personages like God, Brahma, Indra, Vishnu, Lord Krishna, Satan, Mephistopheles, Faustus etc. And, the atmosphere is marked by high seriousness, and a sense of the sublime.

Dr. Anand was reluctant to cast Satan as the villain in ‘Lustus: the Prince of Darkness’ the first book of his Mahakaal Trilogy,  as Satan was a gentleman villain, who was afraid of God’s power. He tempted Eve by deception. Anand, on the other hand,  needed a thorough-bred villain of modern world, who could sustain interest for generations. Therefore, in Lustus,  Anand created a villain before whom even Satan appears a monk. Anand also creates Greda, the goddess of Greed. The grandeur of Lustus lies in two fierce battles he fought and lost against gods in the first two books of the Trilogy, Lustus and the Dominion of the Netherworld.  Dr. Anand’s quest for the sublime continues through The Ultronic Age, where political power is handed over to Queen Ultronia,   because  Gods had realized that it was due to the patriarchal superiority of men that the previous epochs saw bloody battles and manslaughter as we come across in the Ramayana in Treta, the Mahabharata in Dwapra and the War of Troy in Kaliyuga.

In The Alternate Universe, Craza proposes an AI-driven Alternate Universe where humans are digitally enhanced.  Craza’s concepts of removing the past of man, womb labs, and keeping humanity morally upright with AI intervention, and the provision for ‘Edit’ etc.  are daringly forward looking, investing technology with a spiritual responsibility and making Craza a Neo-Prophet of the Digital Age.

Dr. Anand’s latest work grapples with the intersection of technology, spirituality, and human existence. Craza, represents a bold evolution from Lustus, who was an embodiment of corporate  evil. “Anand’s work reflects a profound engagement with the ethical and spiritual challenges posed by artificial intelligence (AI) and modernity, making him a modern counterpart to epic poets like Milton or Vyasa, but with a distinctly futuristic lens.” [Grok]

Craza’s proposal for an “Overlap” facility, replacing the traditional divisions of heaven and hell, can be seen as a nuanced view of morality where ambiguity is acknowledged rather than punished because this world of overlapping morality is closer to the reality of the modern world of technology. Through Lustus, he critiques the corporate and moral decay of the modern world, while Craza in The Alternate Universe  extends this exploration into speculative or chaotic realms. By merging Eastern and Western traditions, Anand creates a universal narrative offers an ethical and spiritual landscape for a contrivance like AI to seek man’s salvation, rather than work for his destruction. Craza’s entry as a potential mouthpiece of the AI is a welcome departure from usual condemnation of the AI. His work not only revives the epic form but also establishes him as a global literary figure, walking in the footsteps of Milton, Goethe and Tagore.  

AUTHOR’S BIO 

Maja Herman-Sekulić  (Serbia/USA) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maja_Herman_Sekulić)

is an internationally published Serbian-American author of 30 books in Serbian, English German and French; her poems were translated in 27 languages. Of her poetry, Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky said: “her poetry is of the rarest talent and beauty as she is herself”. Maja is an acclaimed and multi awarded poet, novelist, essayist, a bilingual scholar, a Princeton Ph.D.and a major translator. She is a vice president of International Ethics Academy from India,and has been nominated by the IAE for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She is a member of the American and Serbian PEN, American Academy of Poets, Association of writers of Serbia and Serbian Literary Society. She was schooled and lived all over the world from Europe and USA to the Far East, and as a triple ambassador of good will, culture and literature has been building bridges between cultures for over 30 yrs. She now shares her time between New York and Belgrade. 

Poetry from Taylor Dibbert

A Priest Asks

He’s waiting in the

American Airlines line 

At the airport in Asheville

And a priest approaches him

And asks him

If the he can cut

To the front of the line

The priest says that

He’s about to

Miss his flight

Before he can respond

Another woman in line

Says yes Father

Please go ahead

And this seems fine.

Taylor Dibbert is a poet in Washington, DC. He’s author of, most recently, “Takoma.”

Essay from Duane Vorhees

Image of Phillis Wheatley's poetry collection. Cover is a yellow circle enclosing a drawing of a seated young Black woman with a cap on her head and a pen in her hand.

From Africa to America: For Flora

POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL (1773) was only the second book of poetry published by an American woman. The 20-year-old author was a slave, taken (according to scholarly consensus) to North America at seven years of age.  In fact, of course, nobody knows for sure when she was born (perhaps 1753) or where (maybe Senegal or Gambia) or even what she was called in her youth. She arrived in Boston aboard the Phillis and was purchased by merchant John Wheatley; and so her “name” became Phillis Wheatley. 

When she was 14 or so she began writing poetry, and by 16 her work began to attract public notice. Because of her gender and caste, she was forced to defend her authorship before the colonial governor, lieutenant governor, and other luminaries. Even after they attested that she had indeed written the verses ascribed to her, she could not get her collected material published in Massachusetts, though well-connected members of the nobility acted as her patrons and secured its publication in England. The book became an international sensation, prompting Voltaire himself to comment that it proved that black people could write poetry. Nevertheless, due to her own situation and the tumult surrounding the American Revolution, she was unable to publish another book before her death in 1784, though her work did continue to appear occasionally in pamphlets and newspapers.

One of her best-known  poems is “On Being Brought from Africa to America”:

   ‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

   Taught my benighted soul to understand

   That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:

   Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

   Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

   “Their colour is a diabolic die.”

   Remember, ChristiansNegros, black as Cain,

   May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

Nikki Giovanni, on the other hand, trod a very different literary path, publishing numerous volumes of poetry and essays, teaching at several prestigious universities, and winning major awards including 20 honorary doctorates. Named for her mother, Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Sr., she was born some 190 years after Wheatley, in Knoxville, Tennessee, but raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, until she was 10, at which time she returned to Knoxville to live with her grandparents. 

In 1967, the year she graduated with honors with a bachelor’s degree in History from her grandfather’s alma mater, Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, she published her first volume of poetry, BLACK FEELING, BLACK TALK, which sold over 10,00 copies its first year; BLACK JUDGMENT (1968) sold 6,000 in just three months. Together, they established her as one of the most successful representatives of the Black Arts Movement that dominated African-American culture in the 1960s and beyond. 

Her fifth book, THE WOMEN AND THE MEN (1975), featured “Poem for Flora”:

when she was little
and colored and ugly with short
straightened hair
and a very pretty smile
she went to Sunday school to hear
’bout nebuchadnezzar the king
of the jews
and she would listen
shadrach, meshach and abednego in the fire
and she would learn
how god was neither north
nor south east or west
with no color but all
she remembered was that
Sheba was Black and comely
and she would think
i want to be
like that

It is almost as though Giovanni wanted to engage with her literary ancestor Wheatley in a poetical dialectic on the changes in racial attitudes over a pair of centuries of American development.

Both poets opened with a reflection on their youthful introduction to Christian worship. Wheatley claimed it was a “mercy” to be taken from her own “Pagan land” in order to learn that “there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too.” Giovanni seemed to project her psychic self  onto a family friend, Flora Fletcher Alexander, who often babysat for young Nikki. — “she loved clothes. Flora was the sharpest dresser,” she later recalled. Nikki/Flora “went to Sunday school to hear / ’bout Nebuchadnezzar the king / of the jews” and about “shadrach, meshach and Abednego in the fire.” But in the style of the times, before the Romantics began to relax the formalist standards of prosody and semantics,Wheatley mostly confined her remarks to a generality, while Giovanni reflected the Post-Modernist penchant for grammatical laxity and politically charged specificity. The Chaldean ruler Nabu-kudurri-usur II was indeed king of the Jews but only because of his conquest of Judea in 597 BCE; he was portrayed as a foreign oppressor in several books of the Old Testament, including the portion of the Book of Daniel where he cast Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into a fiery furnace for refusing to worship a golden idol. (Ironically, as we shall see, the Alphabet of Ben Sidra posited Nebuchadnezzar as the son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba, a chronological impossibility.)

Both women expressed their approval of the universalism of the Christian doctrine that even “Negroes, black as Cain / May be refin’d, and join the angelic train” and that “god was neither north / nor south east or west” — though Giovanni insistently added the clarification “with no color but all” to counter Wheatley’s demeaning allusion to God’s punishment of Cain for the murder of his brother Abel by “marking” him, which was often interpreted as giving him a black skin and therefore providing a Biblical justification for racism.

But even in these religious introductory remarks, race was an essential referent. For Wheatley the matter was a subtext, almost parenthetical, a pun on her “benighted soul.” But for Giovanni the blackness took center stage. Flora may have been “colored and ugly with short / straightened hair” (since African-Americans of Flora’s generation “conked” their hair by using lye to straighten their naturally kinky locks. Black nationalist leader Malcolm X claimed that the process “makes you wonder if the Negro has completely lost all sense of identity, lost touch with himself.”) But Flora’s own takeaway from Sunday school was that “Sheba was Black and comely” and Flora/Nikki decided “I want to be / like that.”

The queen of Sheba made only a brief appearance in the Bible, visiting Solomon in order “to prove him with hard questions.” But that cameo role led to her starring in one of the world’s most widespread and protean cycle of legends. She was probably from Saba (modern Yemen); the Sabaeans also had domains across the Red Sea on the Horn of Africa., and the later kingdom of Aksum (ancestral to Ethiopia) was sometimes referred to as Seba. Nevertheless, though history has recorded several Arabic queens, no African ones are known, even though the queen of Sheba has come to be regarded as such.

The literary confusion seems to have begun with the Books of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament, which referred to her as a “queen of the South” from “the uttermost parts of the earth,” At the same time, the historian Titus Flavius Josephus claimed she was a queen of Egypt and Ethiopia.A century later, the Christian theologian Origen conflated the “bride,” the female speaker in the Song of Songs, as the “Queen of the South,” (“I am very dark, but comely,” she proclaimed, or, in the NEW REVISED STANDARD VERSION, “black and beautiful,” though this translation would have been too late to directly influence the Giovanni poem).

Matthew preached the Gospel in Colchis (modern Ethiopia), and even earlier than that Philip the Evangelist had converted one of Queen Candace’s court officials there, making Ethiopia the site of the oldest Christian church (though “ethiopian” is Greek for “burnt face” and may have referred to Africans in general). The Ethiopians, in turn, seem to have taken particular delight in associating themselves with Biblical traditions. So the wordplay of Origen (conjoined to the comments by Matthew and various Islamic traditions concerning Queen Bilkis, the Arabic version of the queen of Sheba) seems to have been the basis for the Ethiopian national saga, the 14th century KEBRA NAGAST, in which Queen  Makeda visited Solomon, who impressed her with his wealth and wisdom. She converted to Judaism and, on her way home, gave birth to Solomon’s son, Menilek, the ancestor claimed by all the kings of Ethiopia. until the last of them, Haile Selassie, was deposed in 1974. That last reigning descendant of Solomon and the queen of Sheba is regarded by the Rastafari as a divine messianic figure who will lead a future Golden Age of eternal peace, righteousness, and prosperity. (And thus the Rastafari bring the entire process full circle: they adapted their Haile Selassie symbolism from some rhetorical statements made by fellow Jamaican Marcus Garvey, who popularized the pan-African notion of “black is beautiful” and organized various separatist entities in the United States; one of Garvey’s followers was Earl Little, the martyred father of Malcolm X, whose own 1965 assassination sparked the creation of the Black Arts Movement of which Giovanni became a prominent representative figure.)

So, as a leading exponent of the “Black Is Beautiful” sentiment of the 1960s, Nikki Giovanni proudly focused on the fabled African queen of Sheba — “all / she remembered was that / Sheba was Black and comely” — while Phillis Wheatley was meekly apologetic about the way the Christians of Boston viewed her “sable race with scornful eye” because of the “diabolic die” associated with Cain, the world’s first murderer. Despite the commonalities in their two poems, this difference in attitude speaks volumes about how African-American views about the nature of their roles changed dramatically over the course of two centuries.

Poetry from Orinbaeva Dilfuza

Young Central Asian woman with dark brown eyes, black hair up in a bun, small earrings, and a short sleeve blue blouse with a decorative orange and tan collar.

The Beautiful Nature of Spring

You bloom, spreading far and wide,

The trees in gardens, full of pride,

Your flowers speak no word or sound,

In spring, the beauty does abound.

On the trees, the flowers rise,

Pure white, a sight before our eyes,

They look like snowflakes falling near,

In spring, the beauty is so clear.

The rain falls often, soft and light,

Irrigating crops in sight,

The wind blows suddenly and free,

In spring, the beauty’s all we see.

Nature wakes from its long sleep,

Turning golden, calm and deep,

Peace shines in the sky so bright,

In spring, the beauty fills the light.

After rain, a rainbow shows,

Colors that dazzle, as it grows,

It dazzles eyes with every hue,

In spring, the beauty is renewed.

Poetry from Maja Milojkovic

Younger middle aged white woman with long blonde hair, glasses, and a green top and floral scarf and necklace.
Maja Milojkovic

Poem about the Sunflower

In the field where sky and earth meet,

stands the sunflower — alone, yet not lonely.

It seeks nothing but light,

constantly turning its face toward the horizon.

Its stem is strong and steady,

as if holding the silence of ages within.

Its leaves whisper secrets to the wind,

while roots intertwine deep into the soil.

It does not crave fame, nor attention,

only wishes to absorb every ray,

to be part of something greater —

that invisible conversation of light and life.

When the sun sets, it still stands,

with its head lifted toward the sky,

waiting for a new day, a new chance

to feel the warmth and to grow.

The sunflower is not just a flower,

but a symbol of existence —

an existence that follows the light,

regardless of the shadows that fall.