1600s and the desire on the part of Protestant leaders for the general public to have personal contact with the Bible (Smith, 1934/1986). As the colonial period ended and the new country was formed, the aim of the lessons became less overtly religious and more in the vein of teaching moral principles (Smith, 1934/1986). Indeed, it has been pointed out that it is surprising that writing instruction has existed at all in American classrooms given the challenges of measuring it (Monaghan & Saul, 1987). The Committee of Fifteen in 1895 recommended grammar as one of the core subjects to be taught (along with reading, math, history, and geography), but not writing (Kliebard, 1986). All new media apparently have to prove themselves or be “fit in” before they can coexist with the dominant media, and this is no different with the medium of film (the focus of this chapter)—a medium that is now more than one hundred years old. From the beginning of the development of the medium, writers and thinkers have been mesmerized by the qualities of this new art form and just what exactly makes this new medium so different from preceding media (Metz, 1974/1991; Monaco, 2000). Sergei Eisenstein, for example, posited that the film montage “has as its aim the creation of ideas, of a new reality, rather than the support of narrative, the old reality of experience”(Monaco, 2000, p. 402). Over the years, film and video have served many different masters in the classroom.(In this chapter, I am going to be referring to “film” and “video” interchangeably and defining film/video to be “motion pictures whether captured via the medium of film or via the medium of video.”) In the previous edition of this Handbook, Baines (1997) documented that there have been people advocating on both sides of the issue of whether film or video should even be used in our classrooms. Here are some of the quotes that Baines listed (p. 548):