Given the prevalence of multimodal texts in today's world, it is not surprising that adolescent literacies are as dynamic, multimodal and visual as the texts with which they interact. As Kress & Van Leeuwen (1996) have outlined, the multimodal texts that make up a large percentage of our world consist of a range of modes (auditory, kinesthetic, spatial, visual, verbal, linguistic, tactile), their mediums (materials, colors, sound, pictures, lighting, print), and technologies (video games, film, photography). Research indicates that when adolescents interpret the design of multimodal texts, they are engaging in a process of interconnecting modes and sign systems with cultural meanings. If adolescents are to interrogate how multimodal texts function in cultural contexts, they need to develop a meta-language that helps them interrogate the relationships between the modes and the cultural meanings available to participants in any given context. Unfortunately, too often there is a disconnect between the multimodal realities of the reading and writing lives of adolescents outside of school and their print-based lives in school. Standardized forms of writing, decontextualized from actual audiences and real world purposes, prevail in schools; the dynamic, multimodal nature of adolescent reading, research, and writing receives less attention. In this paper, the author discusses a multilayered pedagogical approach to teaching future teachers of adolescents. This was the first class she taught as an Assistant Professor, and she was in search of a pedagogical design that would foster professor and student knowledge construction about the affordances of multimodal textual analysis and composition for future teacher conceptions of writing instruction. Her goals were to foster collaborative inquiries into how to use multimodality to bridge teacher and adolescent literacies, and also to learn with future teachers how to design writing instruction for adolescents through which they could transfer multimodal compositional principles to their everyday reading and writing.