Frink teacher, up for two national awards, makes history come alive
Chadwick Stokes, a social studies teacher who goes to lengths to make history come alive for his students, is living some history himself.
Stokes, in his fourth year at E.B. Frink Middle School, is a nominee for not one but two national awards that honor exemplary history teachers.
The Patricia Behring Teacher of the Year Award, to be announced in June, recognizes participation in and support for National History Day activities. The Gilder Lehrman National History Teacher of the Year Award, to be presented next fall, recognizes an exceptional K-12 teacher of American history. Both annual awards come with a $10,000 prize.
To Stokes, the nominations put the spotlight less on the person than on an approach to teaching history to young students.
“The overall approach to my teaching is making history interactive, making it come to life and getting the kids to put their hands on artifacts. There are a variety of learning styles and I’ve always felt like, for myself as a student, that getting your hands on it and creating something was the best way,” Stokes said during a recent interview in the History Lab he and colleagues are creating at Frink.
The History Lab is filling up with “artifacts” – some original, some copies, some reproductions made by Stokes himself – that give his seventh- and eighth-grade students a visual and tactile connection to American history.
An original World War II cot provides a bed for several newspapers reproduced from that era as well as an infantryman’s helmet and a crewman’s cap from the battleship USS North Carolina. Across the room, a dress styled after a Revolutionary-era frock adorns a mannequin. A cash register that would look at home in a 1900’s general store sits on a cabinet. A map showing the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition is unfurled on a table next to the reproduction of a helmet that looks as if it might have come ashore in 16th century Florida with the forces of Ponce de Leon.
“We’ve done a lot of antique shopping,” Stokes said, crediting fellow Frink social studies teacher Jonathan Smith as a “big inspiration” and an ally in the acquisitions and Sheila West, the school’s assistant principal, as an early supporter of the History Lab concept.
Just as Stokes stands among history in the lab, he wants his students to be surrounded by it. Annual, pre-pandemic visits to the Frink campus by reenactors from Tyron Palace, representing soldiers of the 1st North Carolina Regiment and the domestic side of the Revolutionary War years, brought students inside a military encampment, where they ate bacon cooked over a campfire, and let them see – and try on – garments styled after clothing of the period.
Pre-pandemic field trips to Washington, D.C., for tours of the White House and Congress and to Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown were opportunities for students to “see where history actually happened.”
When Stokes invited Civil War reenactors into his classroom, students inspected the military gear of that conflict and the more adventurous of them ate hard tack and drink black coffee.
“Mr. Stokes is an outstanding history teacher. It comes as no surprise that he was nominated for these national awards,” E.B. Frink principal Michael Moon said. “His passion for history is unmatched and he brings that passion to the classroom every day. It is rare that a day goes by that he isn’t bringing in an artifact, dressing in a costume from the period they’re studying in class or coming to me with an idea for a project that inevitably lights a spark for his students.”
It’s a style of teaching that takes history out of the names-dates-and-places narration that young students can find numbing and makes history real and relevant and even interesting.
“It starts with that passion,” Stokes said, “with realizing who your audience is and what’s going to get their attention. You put things in front of them that they can touch, that they can see and taste and smell. Students remember those things. It’s something that simple, but it takes time and energy and planning and what fuels all that is a passion for it.”
Chadwick Stokes is surrounded by history in the new History Lab he and colleagues are creating at E.B. Frink Middle School. His passion for making history interactive for his students has put Stokes in the running for two awards that honor the nation’s best history teacher.
The teacher’s own passion for history dates back to a childhood in Winterville, when his parents often put him and his brother in touch with regional history. “They would take us to the Lost Colony in Manteo. They would take us to the battleship in Wilmington, Tryon Palace in New Bern. It started to plant a seed in me and that’s how I fell in love with history. I’m trying to bring that same enthusiasm, that passion, to this teaching career,” said Stokes, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from East Carolina University.
Like the History Lab, another year of competition by the Frink team in the National History Day regional event is designed to spark the kind of enthusiasm that inspires an education.
In National History Day events, students conceive, research, create and describe projects, similar to what students do in Science Fairs. Stokes is in conversation with Karen Ipock – the state National History Day coordinator and the person who nominated Stokes for the Behring Award as North Carolina’s representative – about introducing a Lenoir County competition for middle and high schools.
In the meantime, Stokes is active in reenactment events as a member of the 1st North Carolina Regiment and the 3rd North Carolina Regiment of the Continental Line, as president of the Lenoir County Historical Association, as a board member of the CSS Neuse Foundation and a supporter of the CSS Neuse Civil War Interpretive Center.
And he’s starting a new History Club at Frink. He’s already designed the T-shirts.
“I’ve been very fortunate to have the support I’ve had,” Stokes said. “I’ve been very appreciative of that. From the top down, a lot of support has been there to open those doors and has allowed those ideas I’ve had to progress and blossom.”
