Universities in the English-speaking world share a common ancestry that extends back to medieval times. From these beginnings universities quickly developed distinctive qualities as they became integrated within different social and cultural systems of their home societies. A number of comparisons of higher education research have shown major differences developed between North American and non-North American higher education literature inviting conclusions that higher education research communities are largely separate. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of empirical field research this paper reviews the research literature in three North American journals focused on higher education teaching and learning to identify six researchers who the journals' authors consider central to the field. A second level analysis of the citations within this literature revealed that these researchers were associated with developing five distinctive signature concepts used by authors to support their arguments about higher education teaching and learning. By comparing the five signature concepts of the North American field of higher education teaching and learning with the five signature concepts of the non-North American literature this study concludes that there is some, albeit small, conceptual common ground on which to build collaboration between the two distinctive research fields.