And, if I may expand on your lede, t’s not just that students ‘love watching movies during class time’ (and they do), it’s that students who have grown up with visual media as part of their environment and they need skills to be able to ‘read’ those visual texts just like they need skills to be able to read scholarly literature. For example in a response to a mid-semester survey from this semester, students in one of my classes wrote this: “I believe the visual texts (films) are great because we are a visual generation and we grew up on television, computers, etc. ” And, another wrote: “They (films) are really helpful in terms of visualizing or understanding the text that we were supposed to read for this week.”

~ Jessie Daniels, PhD
CUNY-Hunter College