What’s So Special About Special Issues? A Discussion of Their Benefits and Challenges

Welcome to our second issue of the year! As we are all experiencing, living through the COVID-19 crisis has been an emotionally draining time for us all. Now the pandemic continues to present challenges both in and outside of our classrooms due to new variants emerging and swiftly changing lockdowns and border restrictions. As we start our next terms, we recognize that many of our students are similarly exhausted, and they have struggled with numerous challenges throughout the last two years. There are places of hope where countries are sustaining some level of face-to-face instruction, other locations where universities are returning to the classroom, and in other locations, this is not possible yet. Similarly, in our professional lives, many domestic and international conferences will continue in virtual and hybrid mode in the first part of 2022. We remain cautiously optimistic that by midyear at the MOBTS 2022, we will be seeing our friends and colleagues faceto-face again and enjoying rich conversations and debates about important issues in our field. One of these debates includes how we might keep adapting our scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research in these extraordinarily complex times. For decades Special Issues have been one of the key mechanisms for advancing SoTL. This editorial addresses some questions we have received from our readers in the past about Special Issues and we hope to unpack various unknown or opaque editorial processes for authors. Common questions