This self-study emerged within the context of a school-based professional development project that established collaboration between two teacher educators and a group of elementary public school teachers. We launched the Book in a Bag project as a way to promote curriculum integration in classrooms and at the same time to provide a venue for research. Within the two contexts of university and public schools, certain knowledge and practices were privileged, largely as a result of the distinct stewardships each assumes. When tensions arose in the course of the project, we employed self-study methodology. We identified competing discourses of teachers, teacher educators, and partnership, noting paradoxes that focused on discourse-bound knowledge, discourse-driven motivation, and discourse-limited aspirations. Self-study served to deepen our understanding of our own practices and ourselves as teacher educators with an eye to future relationships with teachers.