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The National Geographic Society, American Geographical Society, Association of American Geographers, and the National Council for Geographic Education combined efforts to publish Geography for Life: National Geography Standards in 1994. This important document was a culmination of decades of discussion, debate, and decision-making among these four major geography organizations in the United States. It outlined specific guidelines concerning the geographical knowledge that American students should have acquired by completion of the twelfth grade. Two major goals of this study were to introduce educators to fundamental geographic themes and to inform teachers of available resources and opportunities in teaching geography. The five basic themes in geography identified by the study were: location, movement, human-environment interaction, region, and place (Geography Education Standards Project, Geography for Life: National Geography Standards 1994).
One of the best teaching resources in today's classroom is music. For this essay, surfer rock music is used as a case study to illustrate the five themes of geography, to make teachers aware of the multiplicity of materials that can be used for this genre of American music, and to demonstrate the integrated conceptual nature of geography and its close alliance with other social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences.
The Five Themes of Geography
The five themes lend themselves to the study of both topical and regional approaches to geographic analysis. The definitions for the five themes are: location (spatial patterns of human and physical phenomena, or how things are distributed upon the Earth's surface); movement (humans interacting over the Earth's surface, or how humans and objects move from one place to another place on the Earth, e.g., products, information, or ideas that originate in one place and move beyond their point of origin to other places); huntan-environment interaction (the interaction that occurs between humans as culture-bearers and how they interact with the physical environment); regions (an area on the Earth's surface that displays unity in terms of selected criteria, such as a language group or a landform type); and place (all places on the Earth have distinctive tangible and intangible physical and cultural characteristics that give them meaning and character, unique qualities that distinguish them from other places). In addition to these five themes, the geographically informed student should know and understand eighteen...