Using poetry, role play, readers' theatre, and creative manipulations of space through yarn and paper weaving, a workshop in 2008 challenged one of educational development's more pervasive and least questioned notions ("constructive alignment" associated most often with the work of John Biggs). This paper describes the reasoning behind using humanities approaches specifically in this case and more generally in the Challenging Academic Development Collective's work, as well as problematising the notions of "experiment" and "results" by unarchiving and re-archiving such a nonce-event. The critical stakes in using an anti-empirical method are broached, and readers are encouraged to experience their own version of the emergent truths of such approaches by drawing their own conclusions.