This is the story of our collaborative work as educators and researchers. Because writing as a collective is challenging, we have elected Jenn to serve as narrator, but the story is ours collectively. We are Glennda and Rita, elementary school teachers, Ellen, principal, and Jess, graduate research assistant. The story told here is distilled from our shared experience, our recorded conversations, and our individual written reflections. We begin with some definitions, grounding ourselves in the evolving literature on PDS research. We describe how we have come to understand "authentic collaborative inquiry" (ACI) and the unique potential of PDS spaces for cultivating it. We then turn to the telling of our story--our beginnings, as the seeds of our inquiry were planted--and our efforts since to nurture the project we have undertaken. We follow this with a discussion of what this journey has done for us, what remains to be done, and what difficulties we have yet to overcome. We offer our story here as a context for making sense of the possibility, the promise, and the challenges of coming together across institutional lines in a quest for understanding critical issues at the heart of teaching and learning. We do so because we believe it is in the telling of our stories that we best learn from ourselves and from one another.