Today I attended the first meeting of the Presidium of the Forum for Practice-based Research. The cycle of Lectorates in the Arts asked me to represent them in this Presidium. The Forum intends to support and strengthen the profession of lectors (professorships in higher education) and the outcomes of their lectorates and research cycles. The Forum also wants to stimulate connections between the different domains of lectorates and wants to increase the impact in society of the lector. The focus is on the triangle research-education-professional field. In this first meeting we were aware of the serious risk to create a distance between the presidium and the field of lectors. The presidium is not and cannot be a group of ‘super lectors’.
So we came across questions like:

- how can we prevent developing a top down programme?
- how can we develop an attitude of sharing?
- how can we use new media to strengthen the network?
- how can we challenge natural crossovers between different domains?
- how can we constantly go back to use the potential of existing lectorates?

It is very good to see that we share these questions and this attitude right from the first moment. That is what a Forum should be about. The next step is to formulate a year plan 2008-2009. This will start with an opening conference onn the 28th of august. We will ask all the existing networks of lectors for best practices on practice-based research focussing on the connections between research, education and the professional field. And I like the idea of doing some plenary things but also programming a lot of rather small working sessions with input as well as moderation by lectors themselves. There has to be ample possibility for conversation and exchange.