This study examines what the members of an interdisciplinary research alliance, at the intersection of Engineering and Education Ethnography, learned through ongoing dialogues among members (2012-2014). The analyses make visible how, and for what purpose(s), this interdisciplinary "research alliance" was constructed, including the theoretical/conceptual roots of perspectives guiding the members of the alliance, and how these orienting perspectives served as anchors for exploring points where differences in understandings became visible to members. By tracing responses that members had to differences in understandings, we examine how the differences became resources for members to (re)examine their initial assumptions and understandings of particular teaching-learning processes, and how these differences supported members, individually and collectively, in extending and (re)formulating their understandings of the relationship between and among teaching and learning processes that constituted "no distance education" processes. Through the presentation of three "telling cases", we make visible how the dialogues led to different levels of ethnographic analysis (cases 1 and 2). Each was undertaken to develop an understanding of what counted as the "no distance education" process, both at the design and institutional level across national institutions as well as in the course across times and events. The third telling case explores transformations in understanding particular aspects of teaching-learning relationships that the members reported were related to the ongoing dialogues and ethnographic research.