The five themes of geography are an American educational framework for teaching geography. Adopted in 1984 by the National Council for Geographic Education and the Association of American Geographers, the five themes were published in the NCGE/AAG publication Guidelines for Geographic Education, Elementary, and Secondary Schools. Most American geography and social studies classrooms have adopted the five themes in teaching practices.[1]
The five-theme organizational approach was superseded by the National Geography Standards, a set of eighteen standards promulgated in 1994. However, the five themes continue to be used as an educational approach in many educational outlets.[2][1]
Contents |
The five themes of geography are:[2]
Location can be described in two different ways:
Place is the description of what it is like to live in a certain place. Examples are government types, climate, diet, etc.
How people interact with the environment, and how the environment responds. Scientists currently are debating how much the environment has changed in response to how humans have emitted certain pollutants into the atmosphere.
Movement is the travel of people, goods and ideas from one location to another or political events. Examples of movement include America's westward expansion, the Information Revolution, and immigration. New devices such as the airplane and the Internet allow physical and ideological goods to be transferred long distances in short time intervals. The travel of oneself from place to place, and the actions they do there, is also considered movement.
Regions consist of subregions that contain clusters of areas that are distinctive by their uniformity of description based on a range of statistical data, for example demographic, and locales. In astrophysics some regions have science-specific terms such as galactic clusters. ex. The United States is a POLITICAL region because it shares the same government system