This presentation will focus on a six-month study in an urban classroom in Toronto, Canada with grade-eleven students creating multimodal compositions from concrete and digital materials. Built on the tenets and principles of design, the project looks at how teenagers move in and out of material and immaterial spaces in their production and understanding of texts. The compositions that they produce draw on themes in literature that they are studying as a part of their English program. Their compositions demonstrate tacit practices that they invoke with images and sounds for rhetorical effects and part of the presentation will involve juxtaposing their multimodal compositions with interview transcripts of their reflections on their projects. The aim of the presentation is to contribute to alternative ways of conceiving literacy pedagogy and curriculum through design and through epistemological framing of material and immaterial compositional practices.