Do we have to go outside? Millenial pre-service teachers discovering nature, creativity and self confidence

Creativity and sustainability are listed indicators for global survival, competitiveness and lifelong learning in Australian national statements for a quality 21st century education. This paper considers findings from the first year of a 7 year study into pre-service teacher confidence and awareness of their personal creativity. It considers also the impact of students' immersion experience in a Japanese Garden during the first year of their university experience. Data emerging from the study indicates a significant gap between pre-service teachers' confidence in their personal creativity, and their valorisation of creativity for teaching and learning. It also indicates that millennial pre-service teachers' experience of the natural world is predominantly technology-mediated, rather than first hand. This paper considers the impact of students' experience in a natural environment, a Japanese Garden, upon their perceptions of creativity. The study has implications for the ways in which universities embed creativity and sustainability as graduate skills and attributes, in the context of the millennial student. These attributes are particularly important in the context of teacher education for sustainability, when future teachers may themselves suffer from the 'Nature Deficit Disorder' (Louv, 2010; O'Connor, 2010) that 21st century education seeks to address