Josée Alain
École secondaire de Saint-Charles

Not a school year goes by when Josée Alain, a physical education and fine arts teacher at Saint-Charles high school, doesn’t organize original activities for her students to encourage them to get active. Her most recent project: to cycle all the way across Canada… on a stationary bicycle. When you add this to coaching the football and basketball teams, as well as all her other special projects, you get a teacher with a strong conviction that you can achieve academic success thanks to a healthy mind and healthy body.

“I am the kind of teacher who isn’t satisfied just teaching classes,” she asserts. “Every year, I try to find projects that will get students hooked on physical activity and thus help curb the negative effects of a sedentary lifestyle among teenagers.”

For as long as she can remember, Josée Alain has always felt this strong need to be physically active. When she was very young, she used to get up at 5 a.m. and head to the arena on her own to take figure skating lessons. Today she still makes a great deal of effort, using her bike to get around whenever possible. Even her daughters have followed in her footsteps and both are high calibre national speed skating competitors. “When I made the leap from elementary to high school, I was amazed to see the extent to which young people were ceasing to take part in physical activities. I quickly realized that I would have to be twice as imaginative in order to get them involved and, more importantly, make sure they enjoyed it,” the teacher points out.

The students soon discovered the joys of touch football on snow (with the added bonus of the teacher being the target), volleyball on snow, snowshoeing excursions and track and field in the spring. And this was all it took to lay the foundations for the trans-Canada cycling trip on a stationary bike. “I wanted to encourage young people to take part in a physical activity outside my classroom. With this project, the participating teams have all year to get from Newfoundland to British Columbia.”

The idea is simple. The teams go to the fitness room during lunch hour and make progress by cumulating kilometres. At the moment, most of them have reached Ontario and one team is already in Manitoba. The teacher even thought of asking each province and a number of Canadian cities for tourist information, videos and promotional material. For those who complete the challenge, a bike will be raffled at the end. “What’s more, this project is a combination of physical activity and geography. It’s super!”

Josée Alain is always ready to take up a challenge as long as it has a positive impact for young people. It therefore didn’t take much to convince her to accept the role of coach of the school’s brand new football team in 2007. “I knew nothing about football, or hardly anything, but I agreed for the sake of all the students who dreamed of being part of the team. Now there’s a whole group of coaches and the team is doing very well.” It was the same story when the time came to offer the girls at school the possibility of joining a basketball team that would compete in a few exhibition games against other schools in the area.

The setting up of the Réno-vélo and Multi-Arts projects, intended for students with learning disabilities, was another wonderful initiative on her part. These projects enabled students to repair old bikes and donate them to the needy and to produce works of art that were then part of a public exhibition, two sources of pride for these young people who only too often experience failure. And then there are the numerous talks given by high-calibre athletes that she has organized so that they could share their experience of success.

“Thanks to her determination, passion, patience, desire to surpass herself and above all because she believes in today’s young people, Mrs. Alain has become a role model for students. Schools throughout Québec would gain from being full of role models like her,” asserts in the most favourable terms Guylaine Keable, a parent member of the school’s governing board.

“When a parent tells you that without your involvement their child would almost certainly have quit school, I think that I have helped change things. And it’s so nice to see all these students getting involved, having fun and smiling with happiness. It’s really rewarding,” the teacher concludes.

Josée Alain
École secondaire de Saint-Charles