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This paper describes the use of a simple survey followed by discussion in an online sociology course to create a setting in which undergraduate students may learn about inequality from the study of everyday life. The method described in this paper relies on the common experience of a gendered household division of labor and on the use of Hochschild's (with Machung 1989) recognition, confirmed many times since, that working women in married or cohabiting relationships routinely return home from their paid work day to begin a "second shift" of domestic labor. The familiarity of these experiences combined with the online education platform and a simple, non-scientific survey of class members produced lively interchange, increased participation rates, and enhanced understanding of the everyday sources of societal inequality and its patterned support within the social structure.

The American Dream is a powerful ideology that generates overwhelming support from our fairly typical group of American college students. In order to examine this phenomenon more carefully, we conducted a qualitative study of our team-taught, interdisciplinary undergraduate course, entitled "Chasing the American Dream." Answers to an in-class student survey over two semesters confirmed and enlarged our understanding of the nature of The American Dream. We believe that the Dream seems to achieve its effect in part by its high level of abstraction and generality. Thus, the American Dream is, effectively, an empty basket into which any American can place his/her hopes and aspirations. One can, for example, conceive of an entirely traditional domestic American Dream or one can re-conceive of a twenty-first century globalist Dream. As one breaks down the level of abstraction, generality, and mystery regarding the Dream concept, the support for various features of the Dream—as well as one's likely success in achieving the Dream-becomes less strong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]