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The Sit Lux: Deans’ Initiative for Interdisciplinary Innovation projects combine Mount Union’s institutional core values of service and student learning. The Sit Lux Initiative illustrates how, as a collective academic community, faculty, students, and community partners may engage collaboratively to bring light into the worldthrough impactful service and community-based learning.

Each interdisciplinary innovation project is predicated upon high-impact practices with the promise of providing deeper engagement of our students that extends and transcends traditional modes of instruction.

The Sit Lux projects are primarily framed around the high-impact practices of student-faculty research and service learning. Student-faculty research provides an outlet for individual or collaborative student projects, typically supervised by faculty members where the role of faculty is not only to oversee the design, development, and implementation of the student initiative but also to serve as faculty mentors and potentially as inquiry collaborators as the process unfolds.

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Sit Lux Summer 2023 Call for Proposals

Investigating the Integrative Core

Faculty Participants: Dr. Rodney Dick, English and Amy Laubscher, Integrative Core Director
Student Participants: Paulo Mantilla, finance and management major and Marissa Scott, English major

Project Abstract: Leveraging the current program review pilot process, the goal of this project is to “provide a working group of faculty and students the opportunity to research the literature…and the program review results already gathered, and determine action items...” that will be brought to the faculty in AY23-24. The community outreach component of this project is to have student researchers connect with community partners to collect information on expectations for college graduates

A Matter of Balance: The Debut of a New Evidence-Based Program to the Alliance Community

Faculty Participants: Dr. Megan Salvatore, Physical Therapy; Dr. Ryan Cook, Psychology; and Andrea Williams, Physical Therapy Assistant Clinical and Academic Coordinator.
Student Participants: Chloe Orzo, psychology and French major and Mason Wilkson, exercise science and psychology major


Project Abstract: A Matter of Balance is “a program that has been designed to increase activity levels and encourage behavioral changes in older adults while simultaneously reducing the risks and fears of falling.”  This is a nationally recognized program offered in communities.  The aim of this project is to “equip these individuals with a toolkit that will result in better health, increased, safety, and a higher quality of life.”  The project will start with training the student participants to deploy the MOB program; then the participants will deploy the program at the Alliance Area Senior Center and the Community Commons.