CVEN Academic Profile:
Dr Steven Davis – Chair of Teaching & Learning
Published on the 18 September 2024
Dr Steven (Steve) Davis has been Chair of the School’s Teaching and Learning Committee (TLC) since 2013. He has been a leader in managing, supporting and improving one of the School’s core functions - the education of thousands of budding civil and environmental engineers. The TLC team constantly investigates teaching practices, seeking innovation and stimulating discussion between colleagues. It is also a meaningful interface between students and academics.
Winner of the Vice Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2014, Steve is an Education-Focussed academic, a category introduced at UNSW in 2017 for passionate and innovative educators, and is a keen builder of the EF community in the School and across campus.
The greatest benefit of a stronger educational focus is the enrichment of the student experience at UNSW.
“We care about excellence in education,” Steve says. “We want to do a really exciting job for our students.”
As Chair of the TLC, he says he feels “privileged to see the amazing things that different members of staff in the School are doing in their teaching.”
Steve himself teaches construction and project management at both undergraduate and post graduate levels. Expert in areas such as cost, time and risk, his courses attract a wide range of local, international and distance students. For over ten years he has coordinated the immensely popular Project Management stream of the Faculty’s Master of Engineering Science.
Developing his own online software since 2011, Dr Davis has been able to enhance student learning, exposing the classroom to real world problems in today’s construction industry and challenging commonplace practice, assumptions and beliefs in order to identify and address deficiencies in industry modelling standards.
He has translated his expertise in construction computing directly to the classroom, guiding students in the art of graphic modelling to solve some of engineering’s most complex problems and providing them with an invaluable foundation in comprehensive model building skills.
Steve is acutely aware that different cohorts of students have different needs. His experience in distance and online learning came in handy when due to the COVID-19 outbreak, universities around the world had to make a sudden shift towards online teaching on a mass scale, using digital technologies such as light boards, online polling and other interactive tools. Yet, for Steve, teaching and learning is still all about communication and engagement.
“I’m a great believer in the importance of the social dimension in the business of teaching and learning.” Steve says. “It is a well-established fact that students learn better just by being together in a classroom. It is being with one another that reinforces the importance of what they are doing.”
As studies also keep showing, students need to regularly attend lectures and tutorials to get better marks. But, as pointed out in a recent paper published by Steve and construction management teaching colleagues, successful learning is not just about attendance, it is about engagement.
He and other TLC colleagues at the School recently submitted a paper to the 8th International Academic Conference on Education in Oxford about the dimensions, indicators and measurement of student engagement. Their findings emphasize the complexity of student engagement and the necessity for a multi-dimensional approach in both measurement and advanced technology-oriented pedagogical strategies to enhance student learning outcomes.
At the 2023 UNSW Education Focussed Academics Retreat, Steve was one of two academics followed throughout the retreat to discuss their teaching journey and experiences. Check it out!
