History teacher Chadwick Stokes, who is active in Revolutionary era reenactment events, directs EB Frink Middle School students during a living history event he organized in 2019. Stokes has won an Outstanding Teacher of North Carolina History Award for 2022 from the Historical Society of North Carolina.

An EB Frink Middle School teacher known for his ability to bring the past into the present for his students has won an Outstanding Teacher of North Carolina History Award from the Historical Society of North Carolina.

Chadwick Stokes will be honored next week at the annual meeting of the Historical Society in New Bern. He is one of two teachers in the state to receive this year’s Outstanding Teacher Award.

“Humbled. Surprised. Proud,” Stokes said in summing up his reaction to the award. “It’s really nice to see efforts to bring history to life being recognized.

The Historical Society’s Teacher Award Committee specifically cited Stokes’ work in creating a history lab at Frink and his “overall commitment to generating excitement among middle school students about the possibilities for historical discovery.”

Started two years ago, the history lab is part museum – a collection of artifacts that helps students make a visual and tactile connection to American history – and part research center. “It’s a space to really change how history education is taught,” Stokes said, adding that the lab “will never be finished, but it is ready for primetime.”

In it, students not only see history but also do history. “It’s a space where you actually interact with history,” he said. “We want to teach the kids what it means to actually be an historian and to do what museums do every single day, where they are actually working with artifacts and conducting primary-source analysis with those artifacts and being able to tell a story of the past through that.”

Adding to the lab’s hands-on elements are activities designed to make history lessons three dimensional and memorable. Currently, students are building sluice boxes as part of their lesson on gem mining, which as a commercial endeavor dates back to the 1870s in North Carolina and continues today. When students study the Boston Tea Party, they’ll sample different varieties of tea. For lessons on America’s colonial era, students will make and use quill pens.

“Those are the kinds of things where you create a memory, you create an experience and you get the kids to interact with something that otherwise they’re just reading about,” Stokes said.

The teacher has also brought National History Day competition to Frink and enlivened the school with living history demonstrations involving Revolutionary era and Civil War reenactors.

“Mr. Stokes is incredibly passionate about his content and that passion is infectious,” Frink principal Michael Moon said. “From his History Lab to History Day activities to the costumes and period re-enactments, Mr. Stokes continuously ignites a passion for the subject in his students. He is an outstanding teacher and very deserving of this recognition.” 

In his sixth year in the classroom, all spent at Frink, the Winterville native has been previously recognized for his efforts to bring history alive. In 2021, he was nominated for two national awards that honor exemplary history teachers. 

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.