Cara Ward Honored for Excellence in Teaching

Cara Ward, assistant professor of social studies in UNCW’s Watson College of Education, has received the 2026 Excellence in Teaching Award from the UNC Chapel Hill School of Education. The prestigious award recognizes educators with a demonstrated record of inspirational teaching and leadership.

The award was presented at the annual Alumni Awards Dinner on September 26 at the George Watts Hill Alumni Center in Chapel Hill.

Ward was specifically recognized for her sustained commitment to teaching accurate United States history and empowering others to do the same.

A former high school social studies teacher and district instructional leader, Ward holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and an M.A.T. in Secondary Social Studies from Carolina and earned her Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and Administration from UNC Wilmington. She has served on the Watson College faculty since 2014 and joined the full-time faculty in 2022.

Her research focuses on social studies education, including the use of history labs to teach historical thinking skills and how racialized violence is addressed in curriculum standards. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, including Social Studies and the Young Learner, Social Education, Social Studies Research and Practice, and Whiteness and Education.

Ward’s teaching, scholarship and service include nationally recognized, place-based work advancing understanding of Wilmington’s 1898 history.

For the past decade, Ward has taught the history of the 1898 Wilmington Coup and Massacre in her UNCW courses, reaching more than 900 students. She has also led approximately 400 students on place-based walking tours of sites connected to the events of 1898, bringing history beyond the classroom and into the community.

In 2024, Ward and colleagues received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to create and lead “Wilmington 1898: Geographies of Rage, Resistance, and Resilience,” UNCW’s first summer institute for teachers since the 1990s. The two-week residential program brought middle and high school educators together with scholars, filmmakers and authors to explore the 1898 massacre and coup and its broader connections to democratic values. Participants visited historic sites throughout Wilmington and developed curricula to take back to their classrooms.

Through the summer institute, workshops, presentations and other professional learning opportunities, Ward has extended her work well beyond UNCW, working directly with approximately 300 educators from across the country and helping bring Wilmington’s history into classrooms nationwide.

"It is such an honor to be recognized for this work,” Ward said. “For the past 10 years, I have felt a deep calling to help ensure that as many teachers and K–12 students as possible have the opportunity to learn about the 1898 Wilmington Coup and Massacre. I am grateful to the many scholars, filmmakers, descendants, educators and community members who have worked for decades to preserve and share this history. My goal has been to build on their work by making the history of 1898 and resources for teaching it as accessible as possible to educators and their students.”

“UNC-Chapel Hill and the UNC System prepared me exceptionally well for my career as an educator, so it is especially meaningful to receive this recognition from my alma mater,” she continued. ”I am incredibly proud to now be a professor within the same university system and to have the opportunity to help classroom teachers bring this critical history to the next generation."

Van Dempsey, former dean of UNCW’s Watson College of Education, also a UNC Chapel Hill alumnus and recipient of the Chapel Hill School of Education’s 2018 Distinguished Leadership Award, presented the award to Ward at the Alumni Awards Dinner.