I'm really interested in this idea of play from the text. How do you 'play' in your classroom, pedagogy, writer life?

Like a lot of writing and design teachers, we workshop a lot in my classes. This gives students (and me) the opportunity to toss ideas around and to expose everyone to varying approaches to work. Part of that involves giving students the rhetorical tools they need to engage in good workshop discussions: How to present a project to the class in way that will generate feedback rather than silent (and useless) lukewarm assent. And part of that includes learning how to provide useful feedback.

We also do roleplays from time to time and develop personas to test out texts to discuss their usability. (Personas are a standard method in usability in which designers describe one or more concrete, fictional users and give the user's names, pictures, background biographies, skill levels, work context, etc.

Designers then draw on those personas as they analyze the site. So although the personas are fictional people, they're really useful in Design discussions because they allow people to make CONCRETE statements about how a person would interact with a site.)

Occasionally, we'll take a little field trip outside the classroom to do things like look at the building architecture in order to understand how people move through space and how the building affords different sorts of movements but not others (for example, students will build a brief persona of someone in a wheelchair, then we'll move about the building and discuss what someone in a wheelchair can or can't do: We've discovered that some of the purportedly wheelchair accessible entryways in our building actually rebuff wheelchair users, because the big blue buttons that automatically open the doors only open the outside door of the main entryway, but there's no way to move forward to the interior doors. )

This sort of activity leads into a discussion of rhetoric and usability in general and as it applies to texts.