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 endeavor to work with local teachers and students to create projects that explore the lesser-known American Histories centered around BIPOC communities.

Learn more about Troutbeck's rich history here.

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The Troutbeck Symposium Story

The idea for this project began in 2020 as a collaboration between Salisbury School history teacher Rhonan Mokriski and Marvelwood School Film Studies teacher Ben Willis. The two worked within the limitations of the Covid-19 lockdown to guide students in the creation of a series of short documentaries exploring undertold African American history in our region. For the next school year they expanded the project by inviting more schools to participate, and were supported by Troutbeck, which offered to host a multi-day symposium showcasing the students’ work. Numerous other local organizations joined to help support the students’ projects in their communities.

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 the first Troutbeck Symposium, 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 2022

For the 2021-2022 academic year, students from nine community schools - public and independent, middle and high school - gathered at Troutbeck to share the fruits of their year-long research projects that examined our region's diverse and national and nationally significant BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) contributions with our community.

More about the 2022 Troutbeck Symposium

Troutbeck Symposium Speaker Series

Troutbeck is pleased to present the Troutbeck Symposium Speaker Series to introduce our community to themes and topics in the upcoming Troutbeck Symposium in spring 2023.

Our past Troutbeck Symposium Speaker Series have included:

Finding Freeman|s by Frank Mitchell

"The Cloth" by Taha Clayton

"Coloring Our Past" - Salisbury School Student Isaac Moore

Cornwall Foreign Mission School - HVRHS Student Linus Barnes

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Learn More

Thank you to our Sponsors and Partners:

- Berkshire Taconic Building Bridges & Healing Communities
- NW CT Community Foundation's Lucia Tuttle Fritz Fund
- Troutbeck
- Wassaic Project
- Yale Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library
- Salisbury Association
- Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area