Caged birds and cloning machines: how student imagery 'speaks' to us about cultures of schooling and student participation

With the advent of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), there is an increasing requirement that schools ensure children and young people's views are voiced, listened to and taken seriously on matters of significance. Encouraging these shifts by law is one thing; changing the culture in schools is another. For a significant proportion of schools, actively engaging students' voices on how they experience education poses a significant challenge and crucial gaps may exist between the rhetoric espoused and a school's readiness for genuine student involvement. This ethnographic study illuminates tensions that persist between headteachers' espoused views of how students are valued and students' creative images of their actual post-primary schooling experience. If cultures of schooling are to nurture the true spirit of democratic pupil participation implied by changes in the law, there is a need to develop genuine processes of student engagement in which students and staff can collaborate towards greater shared understandings of a school's priorities.

Micromachined 300GHz high Q resonant slot frequency selective surface filter

The design of a low loss quasi-optical beam splitter which is required to provide efficient diplexing of the bands 316.5-325.5 GHz and 349.5-358.5 GHz is presented. To minimise the filter insertion loss, the chosen architecture is a three-layer freestanding array of dipole slot elements. Floquet modal analysis and finite element method computer models are used to establish the geometry of the periodic structure and to predict its spectral response. Two different micromachining approaches have been employed to fabricate close packed arrays of 460 mm long elements in the screens that form the basic building block of the 30mm diameter multilayer frequency selective surface. Comparisons between simulated and measured transmission coefficients for the individual dichroic surfaces are used to determine the accuracy of the computer models and to confirm the suitability of the fabrication methods.

Two-layer mm-wave FSS of linear slot elements with low insertion loss

The performance of a very low loss frequency selective surface (FSS) comprising two air spaced planar arrays of linear slot elements is reported. The beamsplitter generates a low loss passband response with a very sharp transmission roll-off with frequency. Simulated and measured results in the 30 GHz and 300 GHz wavebands are used to quantify the performance improvement compared to a conventional multilayer dielectrically backed conducting ring FSS. The paper also discusses the effect of the array dimensions on the passband width and filter roll-off rate.