The Oxford–Amsterdam winter school: analysing a conference-based educational model for training emerging scholars in bioethics

Abstract Preparing students to participate in scholarly bioethics debate is a central challenge in medical ethics education. Beyond understanding ethical theories and methods of analysis, students must learn to critically engage with ongoing debates, articulate and defend arguments in dialogue with other scholars, and navigate normative disagreement in respectful and constructive ways. While existing pedagogical approaches, including flipped classroom models, support active learning, they often remain confined to classroom settings and teacher–student dynamics. In this article, we analyse the pedagogical design and educational aims of the Oxford–Amsterdam Winter School in Bioethics, a collaborative programme that has been running annually for over a decade. The Winter School is structured as a conference-based learning environment in which Dutch graduate students pursuing a Master’s degree in Bioethics and Medicine or another health-related programme, and more recently undergraduate medical students from Augsburg, Germany, present critical analyses of published bioethics papers. Students present their work to an audience that includes the authors of the original papers as well as fellow students and scholars, enabling direct engagement with ongoing scholarly debate. The Winter School takes place at the Ethox Centre of the University of Oxford. We argue that this conference-based format provides a distinctive pedagogical model that treats students as emerging scholarly interlocutors rather than solely as learners acquiring new skills. In this sense, the Winter School functions as a liminal educational space between classroom teaching and participation in academic conferences, specifically designed to support students’ transition from medical ethics education to active participation in the scholarly bioethics community. We discuss the educational aims and didactic foundations of this model and reflect on its transferability and limitations. The Winter School illustrates how advanced medical ethics education can foster critical engagement with ethical debate, scholarly rigour, and the development of academic identity by enabling students not only to study bioethics but also to actively practise scholarly bioethics.