The Global Entrepreneurship Marketplace Fair (GEM Fair), held annual at the James Madison University Convocation Center, brings together hundreds of Shenandoah Valley students for a simulated international market.
“This has grown more than I ever expected that it would,” said JMU’s Dr. William Wood, director of the Center for Economic Education. “We started out small the first year in the Phillips Ballroom - and now it would take three or four rooms that size to hold the GEM Fair.”
Mini-Economy classrooms provide the participants. During the school year, students have formed in-class societies, each with its own currency and market institutions. All those markets are combined into a global marketplace on GEM Fair day.
“This is becoming nationally recognized,” said Lynne F. Stover, teacher consultant in the JMU Center for Economic Education. “At national meetings of economic educators, people have begun referring to large Mini-Society gatherings as ‘GEM Fairs.’”
Stover credited her predecessor, longtime JMU teacher consultant Martha Hopkins, with originating the GEM Fair and recruiting the first teachers. “None of this would have happened without Martha,” she said.