This chapter will focus on one type of ‘alternative education’ that has been specifically designed for students who have been disengaged from schooling. As disengagement is the breakdown of the relationship between the student and education, a reengagement program’s job is to provide a context where that relationship can be rebuilt. It provides an opportunity to rethink the pedagogical and structural way we ‘do’ school and challenges us to think that perhaps there may be other ways to include the needs and views of students, as well as the support of the wider community.

There are over 400 schools and programs for disengaged students around Australia, providing education for at least 70 000 young people. This might be the type of teaching that you are interested in, where engagement itself is the main purpose. Working in reengagement programs provides an array of challenges but can present enormous rewards for the young people who get a second chance at education and for the staff who can see that they can make a life-changing difference.

It is difficult to believe that, not long ago, school bullying was a rite of passage. Little was known about the negative impact bullying had on individuals and communities before the late 1970s. Targets of bullying and their carers suffered mostly in silence. Thankfully, we have come a long way in our understanding of bullying. This chapter will focus on a deep conceptual understanding of bullying. It will include learning to differentiate the several types of bullying and their manifestations. This understanding will help you apply the techniques suggested for enhancing students’ engagement discussed throughout this book to recognise, prevent and manage bullying in your school and classroom.

Talent Management: Selecting and Preparing Leaders for Global Assignments examines how organizations select and prepare global leaders for effective assignments. An effective mobility program allows development of global leaders. The chapter identifies the personal characteristics for an international assignee and conditions necessary for an effective international assignment. Family responsibilities as well as a spouse’s/partner’s career and employment issues continue to be reasons candidates turn down assignments. To increase flexibility, multinationals have increased the use of “flexpatriates” in nonstandard international assignments. Effectiveness is the ability to live and work effectively in the cultural setting of an assignment. Effectiveness is a function of Professional expertise, Adaptation, Intercultural interaction, and Situational readiness and is reflected in a formula: E = f (PAIS). The international assignment of female executives has become an important consideration as more women have graduated from business schools and are in line for senior management and international careers. Training should be a function of the degree of cultural exposure that will be experienced. Culture shock, acculturative stress, can be a reason for failure to adapt to the host country. Duty of Care and an organization’s responsibilities to employees are discussed.

This chapter covers selected topics in behavioral game theory. We begin with the winner’s curse in common value auctions where players overbid in auctions and make losses. We then consider standard bargaining models such as the Nash bargaining outcome and alternating offers bargaining; the evidence does not support the latter. We introduce evolutionary game theory and the main equilibrium concept, evolutionary stable strategies (ESS). This is followed by a description of replicator dynamics that gives rise to ESS, and a study of its properties. A range of examples illustrate the underlying concepts. We then consider stochastic dynamics generated by an underlying source of persistent randomness and introduce a stochastically stable steady state. Finally, we consider psychological game theory in which beliefs directly enter the utility function allowing for a rigorous modelling of emotions such as guilt and shame.

For as long as people have roamed the earth, there has been a fear of strangers. The term xenophobia comes from Ancient Greek and combines xeno (meaning foreign or alien) and phobia (meaning fear). In particular, it is common for natives of a country – whether today or in the distant past – to worry about immigration, especially illegal immigration.

In times of turmoil, one would think that a stable, or relatively stable, exchange rate would be a boon to policymakers, soothing the anxieties of international investors. However, keeping the value of the currency stable against a foreign currency such as the US dollar, when buffeted by shocks, entails sometimes painful tradeoffs.

The exchange rate is the key relative price for an economy open to international trade and finance. The price Americans pay for Japanese automobiles imported into the United States depends on how many dollars it takes to buy 100 yen, i.e., the dollar/yen exchange rate. The stronger the dollar, the more yen it will buy, and therefore the cheaper the imported cars will be. At the same time, a strong dollar makes it harder for US firms to profitably sell heavy earth-moving equipment like bulldozers (say those made by Caterpillar) to the rest of the world. The strength of the dollar against other currencies also affects other sectors, besides trade in manufactured goods. A strong dollar is good for a US tourist visiting Madrid, but places in the United States that cater to foreign tourists, such as Las Vegas, do better business when the dollar is weak. And whether one decides to purchase stocks and bonds denominated in dollars, as opposed to, say, German securities denominated in euros, has a great deal to do with how one expects the dollar to move against the euro over time.

The simplest and most scalable type of optimization problem is one in which the objective function and constraints are formulated using the simplest type of functions – linear functions. We refer to this class of problems as linear optimization (LO) problems.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sent shock waves though the world’s wheat market. The world price of wheat jumped from about $8 per ton to more than $13 per ton within a few days. The markets feared that wheat supplies from the region – which account for a third of the world’s wheat harvest – would be disrupted.

This chapter critically discusses the exponential discounted utility model (EDU). In the class of discounted utility models, the EDU model uniquely gives time consistent choices. The psychological foundations of EDU are quite limited, and captured by a single parameter, the constant per-period discount rate. The EDU model is rejected on several grounds. Unlike the assumption of constant discounting, as an outcome is brought towards the present, the discount rate increases, making individuals more impatient, and giving rise to present-focussed preferences. This leads to preference reversals and the common difference effect. Furthermore, animal and human evidence shows that the pattern of temporally declining discount rates is hyperbolic, giving rise to hyperbolic discounting. Other anomalies of EDU that are considered include: Sign effect, magnitude effect, sub-additive discounting, intransitivity of preferences or cyclical preferences, and dependence of utility on shapes of consumption profiles with identical EDU.

This chapter concentrates on classroom structures that a teacher can employ, including how the room can be arranged, physically and structurally, to maximise engagement for all students. We will examine the research on learning space architecture, the role of desk configuration, group workspaces, chill-out zones and ideas for wall displays.

Structurally, we explore the use of routines in class for maintaining consistency and predictability. Examples include managing entry and exit to class, transition between learning activities and routines for what to do when students finish work, arrive late or need to use the toilet.