Troutbeck Symposium

Explore Troutbeck Symposium

For more than a century, people have congregated at Troutbeck to experience the power of place, discuss the state of the world, and endeavor to shape a more just future. Inspired by the under-told story of the 1916 & 1933 Amenia Conferences hosted at Troutbeck by former owners and activists Joel and Amy Spingarn, we work with local teachers and students to create projects that explore the little-known histories American Histories centered around local communities of color and other marginalized groups.

Learn more about Troutbeck's rich history here.

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Troutbeck Symposium 2024

The student-led historical educational forum — returned for its third consecutive year! Like their celebrated predecessors, students gathered to reveal truths at a significant site in the history of American thought and social movements.

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The Troutbeck Symposium Story

The Troutbeck Symposium was born out of a collaborative 2020 project between Salisbury School history teacher Rhonan Mokriski and documentary film maker, Ben Willis. Working within the limitations of Covid-19 lockdown, the teachers guided students to create a series of short documentaries that explored little-known African American history in our area. For the next school year, the project expanded by partnering with Troutbeck, inviting more schools to participate, a total of nine, culminating in a multi-day meeting at Troutbeck showcasing the students’ work for the first Troutbeck Symposium. In 2023, fourteen schools participated.

The philosophy employs a decentralized approach, created and led by educators and students. This means that multiple schools support, contribute, and collaborate with each other across disciplines with the goal of generating meaningful and authentic projects that endeavor to educate the community.

These projects are about acknowledging the idea that history is "messy," encouraging students to be detectives, pull threads and rethink stories and accepted statements through a critical lens.

"Our students are contributing to changing the narrative of who we are and reconnecting it to what really happened. Students dug in, asking ‘what have we not heard about that we should have?’ — exploring how we open the conversation around American history and enduring elements such as race."

Dr. Lisanne Norman, Hotchkiss, contributing educator to the Troutbeck Symposium

Our Mission

Community projects like this one empower students to see the world as it actually is. It brings students from our area together to collaborate on projects designed to ask questions and create an engagement with the history more classically found in textbooks. It creates an enviroment where students become invested in the community and the future of the world around them.

At past Troutbeck Symposiums, students spoke passionately about local history buttressed by their dogged determination to contribute to the historical record by documenting Americans left out of the narrative — people who contributed to our community, but who remain unrecognized. The energy and enthusiasm students show for their projects and the work of their classmates and peers is proof of what a worthy endeavor this is.

Troutbeck Symposium 2023

From April 30 to May 2, 2023, the Troutbeck Symposium — the student-led historical educational forum — returned for its second year at Troutbeck in Amenia, New York.

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