Five themes of geography

Five Themes of Geography is an educational tool for teaching geography. Adopted in 1984 by the Association of American Geographers, those 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.

The five-theme organizational approach was superseded by the Geography for Life standards published by the National Geographic Society (USA), a set of eighteen standards promulgated in 1994. However, the five themes continue to be used as an educational approach in many educational outlets.

Five Themes:

Every point on Earth has a location. Location can be described in two different ways:

A place is an area that is defined by everything in it. All places have features that give them personality and distinguish them from other places

This theme describes how people interact with the environment, and how the environment responds, with three key concepts:

Movement is the travel of people, goods, and ideas from one location to another, or political events. Examples of movement include the United States' 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. A person's travel from place to place, and the actions they perform there, are also considered movement.

Regions are areas with distinctive characteristics: human characteristics, such as demographics or politics, and physical characteristics, such as climate and vegetation. For example, the United States is a political region because it shares one governmental system.

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