Dr. Cheryl A. Ayers is the Co-Director of the Center for Economic Education at Virginia Tech where she creates, instructs, and researches educational curricula and programs for K-12 teachers and adult citizens in economics, personal finance, and entrepreneurship. An advocate for economic education, she played a key role in helping pass legislation that requires all Virginia high school students to take a semester course in economics and a semester course in personal finance as graduation requirements.
Subsequently, she helped write Virginia’s Economics and Personal Finance Standards of Learning as well as develop and deliver the statewide Economics Institute designed to train Virginia teachers on the new graduation requirements. She is currently creating a statewide Entrepreneurship Economics Institute and “Shark Tank - Pitch Night” events to equip high school teachers with the knowledge, instructional practices, curricula, and community resources needed to empower their students as entrepreneurs and employees while strengthening the local workforce and economy.
With a longstanding passion for serving underprivileged K-12 students and adults, Dr. Ayers has served as the director of residential economics and entrepreneurship summer camps for at-risk students in collaboration with the United Way, economic development offices, and chambers of commerce. She also co-wrote the business plan for a preschool and adult education center for at-risk children and their parents focused on providing family literacy and training programs for school and career-readiness at the request of the city mayor and continued service as a school board member and parent instructor.
As one of two innovative reform initiatives, she has trained an entire faculty at an inner city, at-risk school to integrate a school-wide economics, personal finance, and entrepreneurship instructional simulation. Dr. Ayers enjoys volunteering her time by creating and conducting economics and personal finance literacy workshops for parents of students in low socioeconomic public schools and early learning centers, poverty-stricken community members, and adult inmates and correctional educators.
As an economic education consultant, Dr. Ayers is currently the Founder and Project Director of the U.S. Economic Empowerment Project. This project provides low socioeconomic and low educational attainment adults across the nation an opportunity to learn basic economics, personal finance, and entrepreneurship knowledge and skills through “Citizen Seminars” in order to make more informed economic decisions and to effectively participate in the U.S. entrepreneurially-driven economy.
As part of the solution to reducing urban and rural poverty, she creates and delivers customized “train-the-trainer” programs for adult educators and workforce development trainers under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act administered by the U.S. Departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services.
Dr. Ayers’ research and scholarship focus on teaching economics, personal finance, and entrepreneurship in an accessible way that empowers U.S. students and adult citizens for productive, prosperous lives and democratic citizenship participation, with an emphasis on teaching economic reasoning life skills.
She recently published the first-ever, practice-based theory of effective economics instruction and won a Research Scholar Award for a self-study she conducted on the graduate-level economics course she created to teach microeconomics, macroeconomics, and international economics content while simultaneously developing high school teachers' pedagogical content knowledge in economics by modeling effective economics instructional practices.
She previously worked as the Associate/Acting Director of the Center for Liberal Arts and Senior Research Specialist for the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia and Director of the Center for Economic Education at Lynchburg College as well as taught economic education graduate courses at various Virginia and North Carolina colleges and universities.
Dr. Ayers earned a BS in Career and Technical Education (Business/Marketing Education) from Virginia Tech, MBA from Lynchburg College, and PhD in Economic Education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.