In his eighth year in the classroom, Frink social studies teacher collects fifth statewide award
In the History Lab he created at EB Frink Middle School, award-winning social studies teacher Chadwick Stokes takes eighth graders, from left, Erika Otero Sombra, Shelby Riggs, Hudson Horton and Marina Becker back to the Boston Tea Party with a collection of teas stored in a box fashioned after those thrown overboard by the Sons of Liberty in 1773.
By Patrick Holmes
In his eight years as a social studies teacher at EB Frink Middle School – his entire career in education – Chadwick Stokes has won five statewide awards for excellence in teaching. With the most recent, the North Carolina Council for the Social Studies honored Stokes as the state’s Middle School Social Studies Teacher of the Year for 2025.
The thread that runs through all these accolades, Stokes believes, is recognition of his efforts to engage students, to breathe life into a subject often derided as dry and irrelevant.
“It really starts with passion,” Stokes said recently. “You really have to love this stuff. I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be 14. If you can get all children with their hands on history, immersive, you’re going to get a lot more out of them. Student engagement is paramount.”
His strategies for making the past feel more present range from living history demonstrations to field trips to historic sites to the academic research his eighth-grade students do for National History Day competition to the plays they write and perform about historic incidents like the Salem witch trials and the scourge of bubonic plague known as the Black Death.
Students have built 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.
In the role of CSI investigators, they dissect the Boston Massacre, employing eyewitness statements, autopsy reports from the five victims of that 1770 event, physical evidence and contemporary newspaper accounts – detective work staged in a setting the students created themselves, complete with fake snow and fake blood.
The hub of much of this hands-on activity is the History Lab that Stokes created at Frink five years ago, a former first-floor classroom now filled with artifacts and replicas and history-inspired artwork, where students don white lab coats and approach history in the manner of museum-based researchers.
“This is where it starts. This is the catalyst,” Stokes said, sitting among a collection that links students to three centuries of American history.
The History Lab and related History Club are consistently sited in Stokes’ five statewide award commendations – two from the National History Day organization, the Outstanding Teacher of North Carolina History Award from the Historical Society of North Carolina, another from the Sons of the American Revolution and, announced in late April, the award from the North Carolina Council for the Social Studies.
Dr. Travis Towne, a social studies teacher at Lenoir County Early College High School who nominated Stokes for the Council’s award, believes his colleague “has made tremendous contributions to the educational field,” as Towne wrote in the award nomination.
“His development of the E.B. Frink History Lab and History Club to help his student become immersed in the living parts of historical reflection is truly an outstanding testament to his passion for Social Studies education,” Towne wrote.
Stokes’ passion for history – particularly the period around and during the American Revolution – cannot be confined to the classroom. An avid reenactor as a member of the 64th Regiment of Foot, a British regiment, and the 3rd North Carolina Regiment of the Continental Line, he also took part in the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party in 2023. Last summer, he represented North Carolina as a teacher leader at the first-ever Young People’s Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
He serves 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. He is an organizer of monthly roundtables exploring the Revolution and the Civil War. The Winterville native, who holds bachelor and master’s degrees from East Carolina University, is pursuing his doctorate from Liberty University and is in the final stages of coursework for National Board Certification.
“I was fortunate to have parents who exposed my older brother and me to various historic sites in North Carolina, Virginia and South Caroline at a very young age,” Stokes said. “That planted a seed that grew over time. When I got into teaching, I wanted to share that passion with these children. I wanted them to experience history in the way I think it should be taught. If students are engaged, if they are paying attention, if they’re asking questions and showing curiosity, you can teach them anything. They’ll be learning without even realizing it.”
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