Creative activity and time outdoors are both widely believed to do learners good, but they are usually studied separately, which makes it hard to know what the combination adds. These two field studies pulled the two apart deliberately, comparing songwriting taught in a wildlife area with the same activity taught indoors. The findings speak to a planning decision many educators face: whether moving a session outside is worth the logistical effort.
The authors note that a person's "connection to nature" — their emotional affiliation with the natural world, their sense of how interconnected it is, and their habit of seeking it out — is associated with a greater likelihood of acting in environmentally responsible ways, and with better well-being. Spending time outdoors is one established way to build that connection. The authors wanted to know whether adding a creative arts activity would strengthen the effect. They studied Songwriting for Nature (S4N), a weekend camp programme for aspiring and experienced musicians run at Last Mountain Lake National Wildlife Area in south-central Saskatchewan, Canada.
How the study was done.
Both studies used questionnaires completed before and after each programme.
Study 1: 15 high school students (grades 9–10, roughly 14–16 years old) attended two S4N camps, compared with 23 Grade 9 students taught songwriting over four one-hour lessons in a Regina high school. Songwriting time was about four hours in both conditions; the camp added guided hikes, campfire jams, group songwriting and solitary reflection time.
Study 2: 11 adult songwriters (aged 35–66) attended two S4N retreats, compared with 9 university biology students (aged 21–27) at a residential animal-behaviour field camp in Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan — nature contact without songwriting.
Measures included the Nature Relatedness Scale, mood scales covering positive, negative and "elevating" emotions (awe, gratitude, fascination), a short anxiety/stress/depression scale, and the Remote Associates Test, a word-association task used as a proxy for creative or divergent thinking (generating many possible ideas rather than one standard answer).
What the study found.
1. Nature connection rose significantly for both the teen and adult outdoor songwriting groups. Classroom students' scores fell significantly over the same period, despite similar starting scores.
2. Comparing adult songwriters with the science campers, both groups showed nominal increases in nature connection, but only the songwriters increased significantly on the attitudinal subscale. The authors suggest much of the effect may come from being outdoors, with songwriting adding something on the reflective, attitudinal dimension.
3. Anxiety and stress decreased for teen songwriters in both settings, indicating that the creative activity — not the location — mattered for this.
4. Elevating emotions such as awe increased only in the natural setting, suggesting outdoor contact matters for this dimension of well-being.
5. Creative reasoning improved for songwriting groups; the authors argue songwriting influences this more than the setting does.
What this means for practice.
* If the goal is nature connection, hold the creative activity outdoors. The same songwriting content delivered indoors did not produce the effect here.
* If the goal is mood or stress relief, the creative activity itself may be enough — useful where outdoor access is limited.
* Build in solitary time outdoors alongside group work; the authors link the former to shifts in identity-based nature connection and the latter to reduced anxiety and a sense of community.
* Consider a public sharing event. Both camps ended with a performance, which the authors treat as integral to the programme design rather than an add-on.
The Bottom Line
Two small field studies in Saskatchewan, Canada, compared songwriting camps held in a national wildlife area with songwriting taught indoors. In the first, 15 high school students at outdoor camps were compared with 23 students taught songwriting in a school Arts class; in the second, 11 adult songwriters at outdoor retreats were compared with 9 university students at a residential science camp in a similarly remote natural area. Using before-and-after questionnaires, the authors found that songwriting in either setting appeared to lift mood, reduce anxiety and stress, and improve performance on a creative-reasoning test — but only participants who wrote songs outdoors showed increased connection to nature, while classroom students' scores fell. The authors argue that pairing creative activity with time outdoors may add benefits beyond either alone.