This article draws from inquiry-based research that explored the efficacy of practitioners' efforts to create an asset-oriented field experience with preservice teachers and middle school students, responding to the challenge of building a virtual learning community during the pandemic. Through thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), we investigated the pedagogical practices of one preservice English teacher who engaged three emergent bilingual middle school students in composing multimodal identity artifacts during a nine-week project. The findings of this study point to the value placed on acompañamiento--that is, learning "alongside" and "with" students (Sepúlveda, 2011). This aspect of the instructional design was found to be especially important in building a sense of community in the virtual classroom space.