Teacher-researcher collaborative inquiry helps illuminate contextual demands and affordances of teaching and learning and how they shape and inform theory and practice. Elaborating on a university-school study in a Mandarin-English dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programme in the U.S., we examine how the researcher worked alongside a Grade 3 Mandarin teacher in implementing translanguaging approaches across different content areas. We focus particularly on critical moments of dissonance in their research partnership that capture their changing understandings and constant negotiations of translanguaging stance, design, and shifts. Through open and focused coding of qualitative data, we identified both parties' evolving perspectives and teaching/research practices. Ambivalence, doubts, and contradictions characterised their collaboration process as both researcher and teacher wrestled with what translanguaging means to Chinese education within a DLBE context where English hegemony reigns both inside and outside school. Important critical moments are highlighted to illuminate how the pair gradually developed a shared understanding about the need for a more comprehensive, critical, and contextualised lens to translanguaging pedagogies and to learn how to orchestrate translanguaging spaces in DLBE programmes while privileging students' use of Mandarin.