Minority Subjects Research Articles

Patching identity. How Russian language media in Estonia reconstitutes our understanding of citizenship

The conceptual novelty of this article rests in seeing identity not as a nominal category, but as a complex sequence of relationships between groups and narratives. It offers a deeper reading of Engin Isin's “citizenship in practice” and an empirical interpretation of how Andersen's imagined communities are brought to life through print media. Drawing from Raivo Vetik's analysis of the Estonian ethnopolitical field the author explores narratives of two major Russian language web-portals in Estonia: Rus.Postimees and Rus.Delfi. As a result, the reader may observe how the practice of citizenship simultaneously constitutes and is constituted by the minority's identity and subject position. The content analysis conducted from the samples of the aforementioned media outlets shows that the lack of shared citizenship practices between the majority and the minority causes a voluntary grouping along the lines of legal status, language, space and ethnicity. Discussing what constitutes Isin's act of citizenship the author concludes that acts are far more elusive than the ruptures they cause. A media analysis shows that aside from bearing long-term ruptures such as geographical, linguistic or formal, Estonian citizenship practice also received a new one, namely the symbolic rupture caused by the war in Ukraine. By breaking the previous status-quo, it pushes forward securitization and forces the minority to contest, redefine, and reestablish its allegiance and perceptions of its place in Estonian society.

Elucidating Directed Statistical Dependencies: Investigating Global Financial Market Indices' Influence on Korean Short Selling Activities

In previous studies, the short-selling market was a factor analyzed in a minor subject and mainly analyzed through macroeconomic factors or correlations. In this study, we tried to analyze the causal relationship with the short-selling volume of the Korean stock market by using Granger causality and transfer entropy, which is a different perspective compared to previous studies. The causal relationship between major global financial market indices and the prices of major community futures such as Bitcoin, gold, and silver and the amount of short selling in the Korean market was analyzed in the 20-day, 60-day, 120-day, and 240-day window. As a result, it was confirmed that very close linear and nonlinear directed statistical dependencies steadily occurred throughout the experimental period at the daily level.In particular, in the case of Granger-causality, it was confirmed that the causal relationship occurred the most from the price of crude oil futures in both the short term and the long term. In addition, the most frequent disambiguation of information from Saudi Arabia's market index, Tadawul All Share, can be interpreted as a result of having directed statistical dependencies from these oil-related indices due to Korea's high resource dependence. These results are significant because they provide a new perspective on macroeconomic market factors that researchers should consider when analyzing short selling.

Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby

Reviewed by: Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby O. Alan Weltzien and emeritus Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land. New York: Liveright Publishing. 335 pp. Hardcover, $27.95. Montana novelist Thomas Savage, a gay man heterosexually married, threw his overtly gay novel manuscript into the Atlantic (ca. 1964) when his literary agent advised him it couldn’t be published let alone widely read. As we all know by now, his character, repressed gay Phil Burbank (The Power of the Dog), who contains strands of Savage, meets a painful death as he tries to come out again. In his friend Annie Proulx’s best-known short story, “Broke-back Mountain,” Ennis angrily asks his lover, “This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?” and Jack responds, “It don’t happen in Wyoming and if it does I don’t know what they do, maybe go to Denver.” As you might remember, a year after this short story was published, Matthew Shepard, a Wyomingite, didn’t make it that far. Even now, how much safe space exists for sexual minorities in the rural West away from the coastal region? That question arguably represents the central prompt behind Taylor Brorby’s beautifully written memoir. He reminds us that it’s unsafe, outside some urban precincts, for a man to hold another man in public. Brorby’s story shows him inexorably torn between his western North Dakota home and exile. He insistently and lyrically paints his native topography in the country’s least visited state. He’s a poet of a landscape few of us know let alone cherish, and his love runs deep. At the same time, as his title and subtitle clarify, this memoir tells an all-too-familiar story of environmental degradation and destruction, of callous extractive industries that strip-mine surfaces, gouge the depths, and leave scarred ground that’s the short-grass prairie equivalent of Pacific Northwest clear-cutting. He knows the Bakken oil patch and the Dakota Access Pipeline personally and painfully, as his anthology Fracture (2016) attests. He records his Iowa arrest for protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline (260–61), about which he’s written elsewhere. Brorby knows fracking means fucking the ground beneath: yet another example of Rob Nixon’s slow violence. North Dakota means [End Page 80] a horizontal place defined by a five-hundred-foot smokestack and a dragline and endless derricks; it is a “story of self-destruction. Everything leaves North Dakota full and comes back empty. The only way I’ve understood my home is by getting out, escaping its crushing weight, watching the destruction, now from the outside” (7). Our endless pursuit of oil leaves only wreckage in its wake—no new news—and the kind of boys (and girls) drawn to oil patches pose direct threats to the Native boy who, by adolescence, in familiar fashion, discovers himself a sexual minority subject to insult, ostracism, and worse. Brorby begins, “Center [North Dakota] is a place where people only end up” (5). His memoir makes a strong case for escape. He’s escaped to Bismarck by high school and St. Olaf’s College then the Twin Cities as he struggles through identity formation. It’s the old American story of getting the hell out of Dodge particularly if one doesn’t conform to local majority preferences, including heterosexuality. Brorby lives through extensive pain and seasons of tears as he negotiates his emerging self between his roots, his family and place, and new, more tolerant and cosmopolitan geographies. What a courageous story of redefining what and where one belongs. The most painful part of Brorby’s story concerns his parents who provided him and his older sister a range of creature comfort but who turned their backs when he came out to them. In such a memoir, coming out, unsurprisingly, forms a main theme and Brorby sketches several scenes in which his older sister, his grandfathers, and ultimately his two older nephews, affirm him and their unqualified love. Those embraces make his parents’ silent hostility all the more excruciating (they’ve not spoken in years). The...

The Images of Women in the Films on Ethnic Minority Subjects in the New Period

Women in films are portrayed as the “ Others”, the victims of a patriarchal society and a vulnerable group, and since the 1970s, the image of women in Chinese films has shifted from the traditional “virtuous wife and mother” to the “Others”. This paper analyses the images of women in minority films in the new period from three perspectives: ethnic consciousness, traditional and modern factors, and social transformation.

Attitude of Undergraduate Pakistani Students of other Disciplines towards English as a Minor Subject: A Case Study of Undergraduate Students at Minhaj University Lahore, Pakistan

The present study is a first-hand exploration of university students' attitudes by a university lecturer teaching in various departments. The study gives an insight into the motivation level of these students towards their English language class, their expectations from the course, their feedback about the content being taught to them and their general attitude towards English as a language. Students from various departments were interviewed with open-ended questions by the teacher to get in-depth qualitative answers, as well as with a questionnaire of close-ended questions for some quantitative analysis too. The answers of the students were categorized according to research questions, and they were analyzed to find the most common answers and to get the gist of students' feedback and revise our course content and policy of English as a compulsory subject in undergraduate programs accordingly. The analysis of their answers showed that the majority of the students wanted to learn the English language but they found the course content and teaching methodologies, including classroom instructions, a bit boring. Most of the students expected grammar and spoken skills to be taught. Very few students were of the view that ESP courses with subject-specific English should be taught to them. The findings of this research are limited to students of Minhaj University Lahore.

Speaking the City, Disrupting Its Discourses: How Poets like Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan and Leeds Young Authors Are Reclaiming Britain’s Multicultural Cities

The spoken word and slam poetry of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan and Leeds Young Authors, performed live and broadcasted online, is redefining who shapes and constitutes the British city—here Leeds—and its literature today. This poetry constitutes a new lyric, intersubjective and plural form that directly expresses real life experience. The transnational influence of hip-hop and slam as powerful minority art forms has combined with the reach and interactive potential of the internet to expand the scope of poetry as a mode of expression for minority subjects today, decentring top-down discourses on British cities (largely based on London) literature, culture and society.

Emerging professional identities: motivations for choosing early education as a minor subject in Finland

ABSTRACT This qualitative study examines the professional development of early education preservice teachers and the initiatives behind the formation of a professional identity in the early stages of their studies. Professional identity is examined through the motivational factors that guide students to a minor in early education. The theoretical framework draws on educational science and sociology and defines the context of professional development, professional identity, and motivation in the social environment. Narrative data have been analyzed using the FIT-Choice Scale, and the analysis has been further elaborated by classifying narratives into the three identity types of confident, strengthened, and cautious. The research mainly confirms international results on motivational factors influencing career choices in teaching. The results also provide a broader perspective on the impact of the local education system and the labor market on professional development and the formation of professional identity. Additionally, the results challenge the ideal of the preservice teacher. The research benefits not only teacher educators but also policy makers as well as preservice teachers who form their professional identity in the midst of various uncertainties and requirements.

Unconscious load changer: Designing method to subtly influence load perception by simply presenting modified myoelectricity sensor information

Systems of presenting myoelectricity sensor information allow users to understand the body's load for various purposes, such as medical rehabilitation and sports training. If there is a method to create the psychological phenomenon of unconsciously increasing or decreasing a user's load perception simply by changing how to present the myoelectricity sensor values, it will help design a more effective system. Therefore, we propose a method to manipulate load perception by presenting modified myoelectricity sensor information. The proposed method aims to induce higher or lower load perception by modifying the actual myoelectric value to a higher or lower value. We implemented a prototype system and evaluated our method for the two types of load perception of weight perception and fatigue perception when handling objects. The result showed that most subjects unconsciously increased or decreased their load perception to match the presented myoelectric value, while the minority subjects got the opposite response from the majority subjects. This result indicates the feasibility of user assistance systems that use this phenomenon for a good purpose, such as systems that slightly reduce the load perception during physical activity. On the other hand, this result also indicates the feasibility of systems that use this phenomenon for a bad purpose, such as systems that increase user's fatigue to harm user's activity. This study provides helpful findings for designing and using sensor information presentation systems considering the psychological phenomenon.

Bharatanatyam and Buddhist diplomacy: inter-Asia significations in Santha Bhaskar’s Anweshana: The Search for Nalanda

ABSTRACT This paper considers a work of the Indian classical dance form Bharatanatyam performed as a vehicle for inter-Asian soft-diplomatic ventures in Singapore. Widely practiced by Singapore’s ethnic Tamil-Hindu minority, Bharatanatyam took a brief “Buddhist turn” in the early 2010s. In stark contrast to Bharatanatyam’s standard recourse to Hindu mythology, several high-profile stage productions including Anweshana (2011), have featured Buddhist themes, iconography and narratives. I put forward a conceptual model of choreographic reassembly that centers on the choreographer’s efforts at negotiating the regulatory regimes that contour Singaporean cultural production. As Buddhist themes in Bharatanatyam render Indianness as fungible within Buddhist and Hindu religious paradigms, dance becomes a vital site to read how Singapore’s racial minority subjects position themselves in relation to shifting narratives of ethnicity, religion and national identity.

A QUESTIONNAIRE BASED ASSESSMENT OF OTORHINOLARYNGOLOGY (ENT) UNDERGRADUATE COURSE DESIGN BY THIRD YEAR MBBS STUDENTS IN A SINGLE MEDICAL INSTITUTION

Background: A sizable number of patients attend to Otorhinolaryngology (ENT) Out- patient department(OPD) across the country for various symptoms. Being treated as a minor subject in undergraduate (UG) course, the minds of the students are not fully open about the subject and the variety it offers . This often leads to Otorhinolaryngology being chosen as one of the last options during post graduation counselling in surgical subspecialties. 1 The popularity of Otorhinolaryngology is quite different in western countries and is much sought after. The present study was planned to gain an insight into the mindset of Undergraduate students in India on the study course design. 142 medical students in Materials And Methods: a medical college and tertiary care hospital in western India, were assessed at the end of third year ,in form of questionnaire for methods ,form of learning and exam pattern. 82% students like Otorhinolaryngology as a subject but only 42% Observations: are satised with the current curriculum. Students prefer bedside clinics over lectures and tutorial. Videos and models help them to understand the anatomy better. They wish their evaluation to be based more on practical examinations than theory exam. Only two percent considered taking up ENT as a career. Conclusion: We need to conduct more studies similar to the present one in order to understand the study pattern of all UG subjects and choice of UG students for undertaking post-graduation in specic specialties. Some changes have been suggested in the present study curriculum which may help to generate deeper interest in the subject of Otorhinolaryngology.

Terug naar Bonger

Bonger revisited. On a false start and a sudden full speed ahead in Dutch sociology Our tentative hypothesis is that institutionalization of an academic discipline, for example by way of university chairs and disciplinary training schools, contributes to scientific progress. Yet, although Bonger contributed to all of sociology’s three main problems (cohesion, inequality and rationalization), his appointment as the first professor for sociology in the Netherlands, did not make for a successful take off. Institutions also have unintended negative consequences. Bonger remained isolated, the 1921 Academic Statute only allowed him to teach minor subjects (criminology and sociology), and he hardly attracted major students. Moreover, Dutch sociology suffered badly in WOII, losing, among other scholars, Bonger. A change in the Academic Statute after WOII led to nine disciplinary training schools at existing universities, and to 12 professorships in sociology. Of the newly appointed professors, only Kruijt and Van Heek developed a successful research programme driven by one main question broken down into several sub questions. In the decades after them, Lammers, focusing on human organizations, formulated two groups of related questions that contributed to the growth of sociological knowledge.

중학교 역사 수업에서 ‘정동행성’은 왜 학습되고 있을까? - 2015 개정 교육과정 역사 교과 ‘학습 요소’ 설정의 맥락 -

In the 2015 revised curriculum for middle school history, the minor subject [Mongol Interference and Reform] dealing with Goryeo-Mongol relations consists of four [learning elements]: Jungdong Haengsung, Kwon Moon-sejok(權門世族), King Gongmin’s Reform, and Shinjin Sadaebu(新進士大夫). They have a relationship centering on 〈Reform of King Gongmin〉, and 〈Jungdong Haengsung〉 is a learning element representing the Mongol empire’s ‘interference’ and is the subject of 〈Reform of King Gongmin〉.BR However, in addition to Jungdong Haengsung, there are about 10 cases of the Mongol empire’s ‘interference’ in textbook and many other than Jungdong Haengsung were nominated as [learning elements] representing the Mongol empire’s interference in the curriculum revision process. Two factors are believed to have contributed to the fact that 〈Jungdong Haengsung〉 was finally selected as a [learning elements] representing the Mongol empire’s ‘interference’ after competing with other cases.BR One is that the content of ‘political interference’ represented by Jungdong Haengsung is more suitable in light of the ‘achievement standards’ with the main content of understanding the changes in political forces starting with the reform of King Gongmin. The other is that Jungdong Haengsung can reveal the groundbreaking of King Gongmin’s Reform and has the constancy to maximize such groundbreaking.BR The learning element 〈Jungdong Haengsung〉 does not have completeness and suitability in itself, but is a learning element that is established through the role of supplementing and highlighting its meaning by belonging to another learning element, 〈Reform of King Gongmin〉, whichoccupies an important position in the textbook narrative.

Аnalysis of certain component characteristics of drug crime in Ukraine

The authors conducted an analysis of quantitative and qualitative indicators of criminal offenses in the field of illegal trafficking of narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances, their analogues and precursors. Based on the study of statistical data, the most common criminal offenses of the specified type were determined, and the percentage ratio of indicators by types of offenses was established.
 A general criminological portrait of the subject of the specified type of criminal offense was compiled. On this basis, it was established that drug crimes in Ukraine are most often committed by male adults, the percentage of female crime of this type and minors is insignificant. This indicates the identity of individual characteristics of the subject of drug crimes with the subjects of other criminal offenses in general. Attention was focused on the presence of employees of some law enforcement agencies among the persons who committed criminal offenses, among them those with the largest number of offenders were identified.
 The authors of the article drew attention to minor subjects of drug crimes, analyzed their socio-demographic characteristics, determined the percentage ratio of their number to the total number of subjects of criminal offenses in the field of illegal trafficking of narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances, their analogues and precursors.
 The types of narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances, their analogues and precursors, which were most often seized as objects of illegal activity during the commission of criminal offenses, were determined.
 Based on the results of the study of the issues covered in the article, the authors identified the main components of drug crime, and stated the urgent need to take them into account when developing and designing prevention and countermeasures. At the same time, attention is focused on the need to direct them to persons who are typical subjects of drug crimes.
 Also, the authors came to the conclusion that prevention should be carried out not only in the criminal environment, in institutions for the execution of punishments, but also in the social environment of the subjects of criminal offenses of this type.

Introduction: How to Make a Map

IntroductionHow to Make a Map Sara K. Day My finger travels the course marked in red Sharpie,the paper crisp beneath my finger. Sani pulls up a list of touristy things on his phone. It's not a road trip if we don't explore;Backtrack and get a little lost. —Amber McBride, Me (Moth) In her verse novel Me (Moth), Amber McBride follows the title character and her traveling companion Sani as they undertake a pivotal road trip from Virginia to New Mexico. Along the way, the pair stops at several historical landmarks, natural wonders, and manmade oddities, though the greatest emphasis is placed not on the places themselves but how Moth and Sani occupy these spaces with an awareness of their rootedness in the past, both personal and political. Throughout their trip, they are mapping their world—these physical locations and the roads and borders between them, as well as their understanding of where they belong. Along the way, they also come to the realization that there's not always a road to follow or a clear sense of how to get where you're going, even if you know where you want to be. Recognizing the value in exploration, Moth thinks, "Each pit stop [is] a treasure on the map." Like many road trip novels, Me (Moth) is about directions and destinations, but it is also about rethinking how lines have been drawn and by whom. What connects one place to another? What connects us to places? What connects us to each other? The difficulty Moth and Sani face in answering these questions is brought into relief by their awareness of the struggles adults in the novel face as they attempt to navigate their own lives. At the same time, the teens grapple with the ways in which those who have gone before may still shape our paths. Of course, these concerns are hardly unique to young readers; they're also crucial to the work we do in reading, analyzing, and teaching texts for children and young adults. The questions that launch a fictional road trip also resonate [End Page 247] with us as scholars looking across the landscape of texts for and about young people, thinking about connections, locating ourselves in relationship to what has come before, setting out to find something and help others who will come after. The four articles in this issue offer us especially useful examples of how to make maps, identify directions forward, mark paths to follow in our approaches to children's and young adult literature. In "Planted in the Shadows: Centering Sexual Violence in Prairie Lotus, Little House on the Prairie, and Oliver Optic's Hope and Have," Abigail S. Woodward reflects on the ways in which lessons from the past may help us approach current and future texts more intentionally. As Woodward notes, upon its release in 2020, Linda Sue Park's Prairie Lotus immediately generated critical response that focuses—in some cases, almost exclusively—on its role as a corrective to Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. This article complicates that one-to-one comparison by revisiting the now largely forgotten work of Oliver Optic both to highlight the role of sexual violence across these texts and to urge children's literature scholars and reviewers to resist readings that ultimately flatten Park's work. In the process, Woodward follows a map set out by Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck that works to problematize the "reproduction or resistance" dichotomy that often informs approaches to social injustice and inequality. Wesley Jacques's article "Toward a Minor Lit: Reading Power in Douglass, Caulfield, and Breedlove" explores the powerful disruption made possible by thinking about children's and young adult literature as a minor lit. By taking up and refreshing Deleuze and Guattari's ideas about minor literatures in conversation with children's literature scholarship about power, Jacques demonstrates that "a minor lit speaks to the collective literary value of minor subjects, the many evocations of childhood and adolescence in literature as an assemblage of meaning that resists traditional interpretation." Moreover, by performing close readings that engage and destabilize familiar takes on works by Frederick Douglass, J. D. Salinger, and...

Potential for repurposing oral hypertension/diabetes drugs to decrease asthma risk in obesity

Objective Risk for asthma in the overweight/obese may be mediated by adiponectin and peroxisome proliferator activated receptor pathways and may be reduced by the use of oral drugs impacting these pathways, such as angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors (ACE-I), thiazolidinediones (TZD), and angiotensin receptor blockers (ARB). Our study objective was to determine whether ACE-I, TZD, and/or ARB use in overweight/obese adults with diabetes mellitus and/or hypertension is associated with a lower risk for incident asthma. Methods Using an existing cohort of American veterans, we performed a longitudinal data analysis over 15 years. Exposure was defined by the prescription pickup of ACE-I, TZD, and/or ARB for at least 4 weeks. The outcome, time until new-onset of clinician-diagnosed asthma, was studied using survival analysis. The propensity scoring method controlled for treatment selection bias. Results 2.83 million eligible veterans, including 77,278 with incident asthma, were studied. As compared to those unexposed, the use of ACE-I alone, TZD alone, or their combinations were each associated with decreased risk for incident asthma (hazard ratios of 0.88, 0.74, and 0.20, respectively; p < 0.001 for all analyses in the fully adjusted statistical models). TZD lowered the risk among racial/ethnic minority subjects more than among White participants (p < 0.001). On the other hand, ARB use alone or in combination with TZD was associated with a higher risk for incident asthma. Conclusions Use of ACE-I and/or TZD was associated with a lower risk for incident asthma in overweight/obese patients with diabetes mellitus and/or hypertension.

Racial Disparities in Occult Hypoxemia and Clinically Based Mitigation Strategies to Apply in Advance of Technological Advancements.

Pulse oximetry is the mainstay of patient oxygen monitoring. Measurement error from pulse oximetry is more common for those with darker skin pigmentation, yet this topic remains understudied, and evidence-based clinical mitigation strategies do not currently exist. Our objectives were to measure the rate of occult hypoxemia, defined as arterial oxygen saturation (SaO2 ) < 88% when pulse oximeter oxygen saturation was between 92-96%, in a racially diverse critically ill population; to analyze degree, direction, and consistency of measurement error; and to develop a mitigation strategy that minimizes occult hypoxemia in advance of technological advancements. We performed a multi-center retrospective cohort study of critically ill subjects. Among 105,467 paired observations from 7,693 subjects, we found occult hypoxemia was more common among minority subjects. The frequency of occult hypoxemia was 7.9% versus 2.9% between Black and white subjects, respectively, (P < .001). Pulse oximeter measurement errors were inconsistent throughout a patient encounter, with 67% of encounters having a range of intra-subject measurement errors > 4 percentage points. In 75% of encounters, the intra-subject errors were bidirectional. SaO2 < 88% was less common at higher pulse oximeter oxygenation ranges (4.1% and 1.8% of observations among Black and white subjects at a pulse oximeter threshold of 94-98%). Although occult hypoxemia was further reduced at oxygenation saturation range 95-100%, the frequency of hyperoxemia (partial pressure of arterial oxygen > 110 mm Hg) became more common, occurring in 42.3% of Black and 46.0% of white observations. Measurement error in pulse oximetry is common for all racial groups, but occult hypoxemia occurred most commonly in Black subjects. The highly variable magnitude and direction of measurement error preclude an individualized mitigation approach. In advance of technological advancements, we recommend targeting a pulse oximetry saturation goal of 94-98% for all patients.

Performance Prediction and Action Performance Analysis of Sports Competitive Events Based on Deep Learning

Physical education performance in primary and secondary school classroom education seems mediocre, and many students treat it as a minor subject. With parents and schools paying attention to physical education, physical education performance is very important now, whether in primary and secondary schools or universities. Nowadays, college students have less and less physical exercise, and sports achievements are one of the index achievements for evaluating scholarships. Many teachers also arrange appropriate physical training reasonably in order to improve students’ sports achievements. Forecasting sports achievements is the key to making scientific sports training plans. According to the study of college students’ group sports achievements, we can predict students’ follow-up learning achievements, collect, sort out, and study students’ sports achievements information regularly, so as to better guarantee the quality of college sports teaching. This paper compares and analyzes the sports achievements of various schools from the aspects of strength, endurance, and sensitivity. At the same time, it compares and analyzes the sports achievements of major universities. Finally, from the perspective of physical education, this paper analyzes and studies the situation of individual schools and then finds out the pedagogical factors that make them achieve excellent physical education results and puts forward the teaching strategies to improve physical education results, as well as the positive influence of physical education teachers on teaching, school physical education results, and students’ physical quality. When teaching courses, use big data mining technology to find qualified students to study the actual teaching needs, recommend an efficient learning curriculum system to students with reference to research conclusions, and give rich material resources. Teachers can teach students in accordance with their aptitude with reference to their usual learning situation, instead of “one size fits all.”

Preservice Subject Teachers’ Lack of Interest in Their Minor Subject: Is It a Problem?

Interest in a particular subject is one central factor in preservice teachers’ decision to become subject teachers. Interest in a subject can also become visible in preservice teachers’ teaching and may consequently impact their students’ interest in the subject. However, the interest of preservice teachers in their major and minor subjects has been scarcely addressed. In Finland, secondary school teachers usually study and teach two or three subjects. Major subjects are often chosen based on interest; however, the reasons for choosing a minor subject can vary. In this study, we examined the narratives of three preservice subject teachers regarding their interest in their minor and major subjects. They all studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry and revealed a much weaker interest in the minor subjects compared to the major subjects. Interestingly, our findings also reveal that preservice teachers’ perceived strengths in a specific subject may not be as crucial to their interests, as has been suggested by prior research. We discuss the consequences of preservice teachers’ weaker interest in certain subjects and provide recommendations for teacher education.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS STATISTICS AND ATTITUDE TOWARDS PROBABILITY

In this study, attitudes of pre-service teachers (PSTs) towards statistics and towards probability were examined. A sample of 184 level 300 students of the Evangelical Presbyterian (E. P.) College of Education, Bimbilla who undertook the Statistics and Probability II course for the second semester of 2020/2021 academic year was used to conduct the study. The sample was selected through purposive and simple random techniques from level 300 students who either pursue mathematics as a major or as a minor subject. Two sets of questionnaires, one for attitudes towards statistics and the other for attitudes towards probability were administered to the selected respondents. The results revealed that pre-service teachers have positive attitude towards statistics than probability. Also, a greater percentage of the Pre-service Teachers consider statistics and probability very useful and necessary courses that will prepare them for the job market. Again, Pearson correlation coefficient revealed a moderate positive association between Pre-service Teachers attitudes towards statistics and towards probability.

Effective Integration of Distance Courses Through Project-Based Learning

The paper aims to single out critical success factors contributing to efficient implementation of distance learning practices and to explain the role of project-based learning in ensuring effective teaching of profession-oriented foreign language in a distance format. The authors argue in favor of distance learning as a beneficial educational tool providing for the training of large groups of people regardless of the place of residence and placing a priority on students’ individual capacities. Study design included a preliminary survey of 150 respondents specializing in the natural sciences and the humanities identifying the key analysis criteria, a complex of experimental online lessons incorporating project-based teaching principles, and a summarizing questionnaire verifying respondents’ post-experiment outlooks. The methodology of empirical research was based on a systematic approach and deployed the methods of pedagogical observation, project-based teaching, sociological research, and statistical analysis using Neural Designer software for calculating questionnaire results. Analyzing the obtained results, the authors conclude that: 1) Students specializing in the humanities have a higher motivation to study related minor subjects; 2) interdisciplinary integration using the English language allows to achieve a cumulative effect for major and related minor subjects; 3) interdisciplinary integration based on the project method is an effective means of improving academic performance in major subjects; 4) interdisciplinary integration based on the project method makes it possible to acquaint students with the best practices in their chosen specialty; 5) project method allows to achieve related didactic goals—self-expression, independent continuous learning and the formation of professional competencies.