While academic conferences and professional associations were amongst those societal structures that were immediately (and arguably forever) changed by the pandemic , many -- including this article's authors and this special issue's editors -- would argue that long before the pandemic, the static structure of professional conferences had made them decidedly less relevant to their members and their fields. In response, in 2022 the Association of Teacher Educators launched the Inquiry Initiative, aiming to develop a novel form of collaborative research structure, uniting teacher education scholars and practitioners to examine and address "opportunity gaps" in education. In this introductory article to this special issue, we explore these professional association contexts and teacher education research circumstances in an effort to help readers understand the unique set of factors that have resulted in this edition of The New Educator. We share a concise history of academic conferences in the US; we situate this history in a brief literature review on collaborative research structures. We outline the elements of the Initiative as it has been implemented over the course of the last three years, concisely detailing the nature of the "opportunity gaps" focus of the first Initiative, and offering short summaries of the articles in this special issue, considering their connections to the "opportunity gaps" topic. We conclude with a reflection on the nature of academic scholarship in the US and the need for and place of such alternative collaborative structures in the service of these research endeavors.