It is mentioned in the Quebec Education Program that to ensure the comprehensive development of the students, we must reinforce the subject-specific (proper to each disciplines) and the cross-curricular competencies (MEQ, 2001; MELS, 2006). Student’s success becomes a concerted action between all the teaching services, staff members and educative complementary services. It is even more important today considering the fact that it is mandatory to consider the five broad areas of learning, the first being the Health and well-being. This shared responsibility of the health education has teachers reviewing their teaching practices and has increased their partnership with other educators, the parents and the community (MELS-MSSS, 2003). In this context, the training of intern teachers must be reviewed: do they have, during their training, the opportunity to develop the competencies needed to take on all the challenges associated with the health education and the needs to learn to work in partnership? An analysis of the training in Quebec’s universities shows that there is no specific course in health education offered to the intern teachers in all of the domains, except for physical and health education program. On the other hand, during the training of physical and health education teachers, a small proportion of the courses descriptors refers to elements related to health education (Otis, 2008; LeCren, 2006). In this context, it is very important that we develop ways to prepare teachers for what will be required of them in the future; teaching health education and working in partnerships (Marcel, 2002). The Cap-santé project was created to address this problem. This pilot project aims to train about twenty students of three different programs at the Faculté des Sciences de l’éducation at the Université du Québec à Montréal. The goal is to implant a health education project, in partnership with one or more members of the school or the community, during their eight weeks training period in an elementary school. A nine hours training program has been offered before their teaching period started (October 2008) and there were individual follow-up all through their teaching period (November and December 2008) (Pineault, 1986). This conference will present the results of this experience from the student’s viewpoint.

To assess the students’ experience about the project, two methods of data collection were used; a pre training period (n=19) and a post teaching period (n=15) questionnaire and an interview. The final sample is composed of 2 men and 13 women; 5 participants are from the preschool and elementary teachers program, 7 from the physical and health education program and 3 from special education and social adjustment program. From all participants, 7 accepted to do the interview. Those interviews attended to determine what they liked and disliked about the project and the support available to them, as well as the difficulties and opportunities they encountered. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed according to the steps of a content analysis with the software NVIVO.

Preliminary results indicate that the students from all three programs were very satisfied from the experience they acquired throughout this project. They felt quite confident that they could deal with the tasks to accomplish as future health educators. Furthermore, they seem better equipped to develop partnerships with different actors in the school and in the community. However, due to the short duration of the project, two months, and because the different actors of the school were not prepared for that yet, the development of real partnerships has not been very conclusive. However, this project also allowed the students to realize how many different ways that health education can be implanted in the school and this, despite the difficulties encountered and the amount of work required. Considering the present state of the education system and the positive results from the pilot project, such initiative should be encouraged on a larger scale.