Creativity and motivation of pupils in artistic expression in the forest as an outdoor environment

Humans have always been creative beings and well connected with nature. Already in the past, people have shown their creativity in the field of music, fine arts and various other contents. Nature was their classroom. They learned to live in balance with nature and be one with it. Nowadays, however, this has become completely different. Due to the fast lifestyle, and such rapid development, but different goals we have lost this contact with nature (Pori and Klopčič Hološević, 2016). As a result, we unconsciously passed this on to our children, who today are growing up quite alienated from nature. They spend a lot of time indoors, where they are inactive and without stimuli from the natural environment. Children need to spend time in nature, for free play as well as learning in nature, in the outdoor environment. There is no difference in the field of education either. Teachers still teach in their indoor classrooms and mostly go outdoors only in case of a sports lesson or some science topics which are otherwise difficult to show indoors. So, if we would like the child to make contact with nature back, he must experience it, and he will experience it only if he is in it. Much has already been researched on how teaching in nature, the principle of forest pedagogy, has a positive effect on children. However, very little has been researched specifically in terms of the impact of the forest on creativity in performing art tasks. In the theoretical part we described creativity in general, the importance of encouraging it in students, different strategies to encourage creativity, children's creativity in general and specific creativity in fine arts, factors of artistic creativity by which we evaluated art products in empirical work and then a few words about motivation. Later, we focused even more on the field of outdoor teaching and then touched specifically on forest pedagogy as one of the forms of outdoor learning. We also used this type of outdoor teaching in empirical work. In the empirical part, we used qualitative research and a descriptive method to determine the difference between the creativity of art products and the motivation of students in performing those arts in the indoor environment (indoor classroom) and the outdoor environment (forest classroom). We performed 6 art tasks with the students, namely , 3 art tasks in the indoor space (indoor classroom) and the other 3 tasks in the outdoor space (forest classroom). With a detailed analysis of students' art products, we tried to determine how the forest, as an external learning environment, affects the creativity, motivation, and the mood of the children. Based on three evaluators who evaluated children's art products by levels, by observation and after talking to students, the results of the research showed that students showed a higher level of creativity and motivation in creating art outdoors (forest classroom) than indoors (indoor classrooms). Based on the obtained results, we can encourage another pedagogue, more precisely an art pedagogue, to decide to perform art tasks in the outdoor environment (forest classroom) and provide children with this experience