This blog is the first in a series on geography’s core concepts, and how to understand and use them. I will write about what the core concepts are, how to unpack them into ideas that students can comprehend and work with, and how these concepts can be used to help students to think geographically and productively. Concepts are an integral part of the curriculum in a number of countries, and in the UK the 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review recommended ‘minor refinements to the Geography Programmes of Study and GCSE subject content to … deepen children and young people’s understanding of key geographical concepts’.
I will start by identifying the core concepts in geography. Different national curriculums have different lists, but they mostly agree on four fundamental ones— place, space, environment and interconnection. They are central to geographical thinking and are the subject’s biggest ideas, because:
- They are each at the top of a hierarchy of concepts of increasing complexity and abstractness, as they incorporate simpler and less abstract concepts, but cannot be subsumed by an even bigger and more abstract one. Place, for example, incorporates region; environment incorporates nature and landscape; and interconnection incorporates systems.
- They can be applied to a great variety of topics and across different fields of the subject, and so give geography a degree of unity and coherence.
- They have a number of functions, such as identifying topics worth studying and questions to ask, organising information, suggesting methods of analysis, forming generalisations, identifying possible explanations, and providing a basis for public policies.
These characteristics will be described in subsequent blogs.
Time or change, scale and sustainability are other common core concepts in school geography curriculums. However, they differ from the first four in their more limited range of functions. Scale, for example, is largely an analytical concept, because it is mostly used in geography to analyse relationships by investigating them at different scales, or across scales. Time is also an analytical concept, because it can be used to explain phenomena by understanding how they have developed or changed over time. Sustainability, on the other hand, is largely an evaluative concept, because it is mostly used to assess the implications of an environmental change, or the economic or demographic viability of a place.
So in these blogs I will talk about place, space, environment, interconnection, time, scale and sustainability.
Next blog: Unpacking the concepts