USING ACTION RESEARCH TO DEVELOP INTERNATIONAL LEADERSHIP IN TEACHER EDUCATION 1 T.W. Maxwell University of New England tmaxwell@une.edu.au Keywords: action research; leadership; international capacity building; impact Abstract In late 2007 19 Australian Leadership Awards Fellowships were awarded in teacher education to the University of New England. A model of capacity building was used to maximise sustainability and impact. Key features of this model are (1) learning taking place over time, (2) actions built into the project upon return and (3) incentives. The key finding is that the approach appears to work as evidenced by at least 12 of the 19 participants producing a report based in an action research project of their own choice. The major difficulty was English language and this, it is presumed, created too great a difficulty for some to complete the program. Introduction The purpose of this paper is to present a model for sustainable capacity building illustrated by the AusAID Australian Leadership Award (ALA) Fellowships Grant for 2008/9 in which 19 leaders in teacher education (TE) from four countries took part in capacity building. The paper addresses the issue of impact upon practice using capacity building. This is an issue about which there is scant evidence especially at the international level. Action research, as a capacity building strategy, has a strong claim for impact. This has been evidenced by many case studies using action research. Grundy (1995), amongst others, has argued persuasively that action research is inherently associated with professional development (capacity building). Action research she argues, is 1 Paper presented at the Australian Teacher Education Association conference entitled “Teacher Education Crossing Borders”, Albury, ATEA, 1 st July, 2009. This work was partially funded by AusAIDs’ ALA Fellowship Program.