This past summer, four East Campus students and two East Campus staff members, including lead teacher Holly Hanna, rode on RAGBRAI (The Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride across Iowa), and that experience sparked a new project at the school: A bike library.

The bike library would be essentially what it sounds like: A place where people could come to rent or borrow bicycles. However, because the project is still in the early stages, the specifics of how it would function— such as whether there would be a fee to rent a bike or if there's even a need or want for a bike library in Muscatine — aren't yet determined.

The design process of the business is expected to take about two years, said Hanna, who introduced the idea to students in the English class she teaches.

This past semester, students have been learning more about how to research, using those skills to look up information on biking and bike libraries and analyzing their findings. They've also been exploring the world of advertising and learning about communication, visual rhetoric and rhetorical devices —such as ethos, pathos and logos. Because all their studying is geared toward creating the bike library, they're not only learning theories, but applying those theories on a project in their own community.

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