Stories and Engaging Students

My creative project is going to be a hybrid creative story and academic paper. One part will be a very short fictional story that should (if I am successful) imply meanings that have to do with my thesis; it should be easy to draw out the meaning of my essay from my story. The other, longer, part will be the essay, which will use the story as an illustration/example for my thesis and research. I've done a ton of research on how students use rhetoric to draw meaning out of literature, and how different it feels to draw meaning out of non-creative work. Students think they're bullshitting when they draw meaning out of non-creative work. The last article I looked at was awesome because it actually gave scientific and anthropological background for why stories are more engaging for people to read than non-creative work.