Students will learn how to use geographic thinking and information to make well-reasoned decisions and to solve personal and community problems.
Geographic education enables students to use geographic perspectives, knowledge, and skills to engage in ethical action with regard to self, other people, other species, and Earth's diverse cultures and natural environments.
Geography connects students to world events, problems, and decisions throughout their lives.
A consortium of professional geographers and teachers in the United States collaborated to develop 5 fundamental and inter-related themes to lend structure to the study of geography :
1. Location
Geographic education helps the learner to know how to determine and describe the absolute location (e.g., grid coordinates, street location) and relative location (e.g., the location of a stock exchange in a city’s central business district).
2. Place
A location takes on the character of place when meaning is given to natural and human phenomena occurring there.
Each place has a character that is expressed by such features as patterns, differences, similarities, sequence, and connections.
3. Interaction
This theme attempts to reconcile environmental determinism and possibilism.
4. Movement
Natural and human systems are fluid rather than static.
A given place is what it is as a result of the movement of energy, goods, services, ideas, and people to and from other places.
5. Region
In geographic terms, a region is an area in which significant characteristics relate to each other (i.e., areal association) to make it unique and definable from other areas (i.e., areal differentiation). These characteristics may be natural (i.e., geomorphic, climatic, or biotic) or human (e.g., economic, political, or cultural).
A natural region may be described as formal, and a human-made region as informal.
The geographically literate person is one who knows and understands :
1. The World in Spatial Terms
+ how to use maps and other geographic representations, tools, and technologies to acquire, process, and report information from a spatial perspective
+ how to use mental maps to organize information about people, places, and environments in a spatial context
+ how to analyze the spatial organization of people, places, and environments on earth’s surface
2. Places and Regions
+ The physical and human characteristics of places
+ That people create regions to interpret earth’s complexity
+ How culture and experience influence people’s perceptions of places and regions
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