The Cracks are Showing, Issues in Lakehead Orillia’ Consecutive Educations Program
Lakehead University Orillia’s Faculty of Education was supposed to represent access and innovation, a smaller campus designed to open doors for aspiring teachers across Simcoe County and beyond. Yet, for many education students, the experience has become one of exhaustion, dismissal, and hypocrisy.
“They told us, you’re adults, deal with it,” said Terry Yeung, a second year student in the consecutive education program. “But when we try to actually act like adults, managing our time, giving feedback or asking for change, they treat us like children.” Yeung’s frustration echoes what several students have described as a systemic disregard for the lived experiences of commuters, mature students, and working students, the very people our campus was built to serve.
The controversy began with a sudden restructuring of the Faculty of Education's schedule. Instead of allowing students to select classes individually, a typical system across universities, the faculty imposed a new “cohort model,” assigning students to predetermined timetables. On paper, the system was meant to streamline scheduling, in practice, Yeung said it’s been "absolutely disastrous…Now we have people commuting four or five days a week,” he said. “Last year, there were three. I drive an hour and a half each way, that’s 15 hours a week gone, not counting gas money or exhaustion.”
Students who live as far as the Greater Toronto Area face brutal commutes that eat into their time for coursework, jobs, and family. In addition many are mature students, some with children, and most work part-time to stay afloat. “They just told us, ‘you're adults,’ Yeung said. “But we have families. We have jobs. That’s not an excuse for poor planning
Lakehead University’s Faculty of Education is run jointly across its Thunder Bay and Orillia campuses. But according to Yeung, the people designing the schedules live over 1,000 kilometers away, in a city with different demographics and geography. “They don’t get it,” he said. “They’re not commuters. They live in Thunder Bay, so when they make our schedules, they miss that context. That lack of local understanding has amplified the sense of disconnect.” Orillia students, many from Simcoe County and the GTA, depend on long bus routes and early morning drives, issues the Thunder Bay administration simply cannot observe.
Lakehead’s Faculty Education is among the first in Canada to emphasize environmental education. But students say the university's rhetoric doesn’t match its practice “For a school that preaches environmental education, it's very unfriendly to the environment to make us commute five days a week,” Yeung pointed out. “We’re literally burning gas every day to attend seminars that could have been online.”
Among the most common complaints are the Monday morning seminars, mandatory in person sessions running from 8:30 A.M to 12:30 P.M. Despite previous hybrid options, attendance is now strictly enforced in-person. “Last year we could attend online,” Yeung explained. “This year, they made it mandatory in-person, even for commuters who wake up at six in the morning to get here. The content isn't even relevant most of the time.” In one seminar, he said, the topic was EQAO, a standardized test irrelevant to most intermediate and senior level teacher candidates. The frustration was compounded by what students described as a “patronizing” level of control. “Somebody went to the washroom and the professor chased them down asking where they were going,*” Yeung recalled. “These are adults. We’re treated like adults when it’s convenient for the administration, and like children when it’s not.”
Students’ perception of administrative condescension isn’t unfounded. In a September 2024 message to students, Dean Dr. Wayne Melville wrote that “over the past few years” some students and even “their parents” had taken concerns “to the president, the Ontario Human Rights Commission, the media, and the Ontario College of teachers…and in one case, the Minister of Education.” Melville then added: “And another fun fact, under privacy laws, parents have no standing in issues between the university and a student.”
While the rest of the letter discusses assessment and policy issues, this section stood out for its flippant, almost sarcastic tone. Ending with the suggestion that “practising resolving concerns as close to the source of the issue…will make your career and life a whole lot happier,” the Dean’s Message reads more like an editorial blog post rather than an official communication from an academic leader. For many students this tone confirms the underlying problem: institutional defensiveness, not accountability. “It felt condescending,” Yeung said. “We bring issues up, and they joke about it in emails.”
When asked how well Lakehead prepares students for actual teaching, Yeung rated his readiness a “Three out of Ten.*” Then stated, “we don’t do enough practical work,” he said. “They focus on theory, things like universal design for learning, but not on what real classrooms are like. Teachers in the field don't have time to apply all that theory. Students would benefit from more mock interviews, hands-on training, and real-world presentations rather than repeated lessons in educational philosophy.*”
Despite this criticism, Yeung acknowledged that the cohort system has at least fostered micro-communities, tight knit groups within each cohort who support one another. Still, the broader education faculty feels fractured. Yeung remarked: “we don’t really know what other cohorts are doing,” he said. “It’s like each group is its own island.”
In our interview Yeung remarked, as have many other students, that one of the wonderful things about Lakehead Orillia is how it provides access to education, this has succeeded on paper. The campus does provide opportunities for students who cannot relocate to Thunder bay, or another university in the Greater Toronto Area. But that accessibility means little, Yeung argues, if the school ignores the practical realities of the students it attracts. “They’re proud of giving people access to education,” he said. “But they neglect the core factors of who’s being educated.” When the people making decisions are over a thousand kilometers away, when commuter realities are brushed off, and when "environmental education” means driving a hundred kilometers a day - something has gone wrong in translation.
Lakehead University’s Faculty of Education has long asked its students to reflect on how learning environments can empower others. Yet its own approach has left many feeling powerless, caught between a disconnected Thunder Bay and the demands that life makes of them. “We’re not asking for the world…Just some respect, and a schedule that makes sense.” Until that lesson is learned, Lakehead’s message of accessibility may remain just that, a message.