This year’s theme looks at how new ways of teaching and learning are helping to shape illustration education in a world that feels increasingly uncertain. Through a series of online events, workshops, and conversations, we’ll share ideas and approaches that respond to change, and explore how we can support creativity at every stage of life. By bringing together educators, practitioners, and researchers, we hope to build an open, supportive space for learning, making, and sharing—one that’s inclusive, adaptable, and forward-looking.

Sharing ideas and resources is central to what we do. The Illustration Educators website acts as a platform to connect us, and to publicly advocate for our shared interests and concerns. We also invite members to contribute resources they’ve created in response to this year’s theme.

We chose the word hope for the theme title after much discussion—it wasn’t a decision we took lightly. But when I read Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain (2025), her use of the word hope really struck a chord. It captured exactly the feeling we were trying to express.

… I’ve cherished unpredictability as the other face of possibility — if you already know what's going to happen, then there's nothing more or nothing else possible, a view that often leads to disengagement and passivity. But mostly we don’t know; those proclamations about inevitability are often false prophesies. Hope in this sense is just the recognition that in that uncertainty there may be the space in which we move towards the best and away from the worst of those possibilities, that the future is not a place that already exists, towards which we are trudging, but a place that we are creating with what we do (or don’t) in the present. Or, rather, hope is that recognition and a commitment to the peruse of the better possibilities within the spaciousness of the unknown, the not yet created. As Audre Lorde said “To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security, (they don’t mean me), or by despair, (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.” - Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uncertain Times (2025)