The common thread that runs through the activities in a literacy course for undergraduate preservice teachers is text. One such activity is a literacy autobiography in which students focus on themselves as learners and teachers. Students are treated as professionals and make their own decisions about how they want to present themselves to their colleagues and their friends in the professional community. Among the students interest is broad and intense. Once completed, the literacy autobiographies are read aloud in small groups, discussed, and written about in students' journals. The commonalities and differences cultivate a discussion of readers and writers and how they got that way. Two other activities are professional development groups and "kidwatching." Each group of students reads one of the supplementary texts for the course and develops a presentation of the text for the whole class. To understand kidwatching, the students start by watching each other. A few students come to the center of the classroom and think and talk out loud as they prepare egg foo young using a wok--an elaborate and complex text that the instructor and students struggle to explain to each other. Texts such as these can be viewed as concentric rings which have spaces in them that allow the flow and overflow of learning to occur. (A figure illustrating concentric rings of texts is included; five references, the four required texts for the course, and the 11 supplemental texts for the course are attached.) (RS)