At the beginning of the inquiry project, I was kind of confused as to what we were supposed to do. I did not really know what I wanted to inquire about or how we were suppose to be “exploring” something. However, our teacher gave us a list of ideas and topics that we could use to focus on as our inquiry. I had talked to my mom about the assignment and she gave me an idea about arranged marriages and its role in American culture. I was having trouble coming up with some inquiry questions and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to focus on with that topic. So, I ended up changing my inquiry to Islamophobia. It seemed more comfortable to inquire and write about because as a writer, I like writing about injustice or some sort of issue with minority groups. Being a Sikh and wearing a turban, I also was a victim of Islamophobia and so, because of personal experiences, I wanted to inquire about it even more as to why it was such a big issue.

     Researching about the topic was actually very interesting because I found a lot of information that I didn’t know about such as Islamophobia actually started around World War 1 and not after 9/11. I found some information that was very saddening such as the amount of discrimination of Muslims and hate-crimes associated with Islam that Muslims face today post-9/11. I felt that the United States was not doing much to prevent Islamophobia even though the country was founded on the basic principles of religious freedom.  In the process of researching, we had to use different sources including the Atkins Library, which I found very resourceful. I thought the annotated bibliography was very nice because we actually had to read through and summarize our sources instead of just copying and pasting a link and doing a simple MLA citation. I had a lot of fun with digitalizing the blog because I got to play around with different blog settings and adding different features to make my blog more appealing.

     Overall, I thought the inquiry blog project was a lot of fun and I learned many things from researching from a variety of useful sources. This project also gives me a gateway and a path to further research projects not in just an English class, but other classes too because we learned to research with so many different sources that weren’t just websites but articles, videos, and documents too. The researching tips I learned from this inquiry project were very useful and I will definitely apply them on future researching exhibitions.