Essential Element: Place and Regions
How culture and experience influence people’s perceptions of places and regions.
The geographically informed person must understand that our own culture and life experiences shape the way we perceive places and regions. Perceptions are the basis for understanding a place’s location, extent, characteristics, and significance. Throughout our lives, culture and experience shape our worldviews, which in turn influence our perceptions of places and regions. Children growing up in the Netherlands, for example, have a much different understanding of the role of water in their lives than their peers in the Sahara Desert. The difference between the abundance and scarcity of water in each of these physical environments affects every aspect of their respective cultures, including the global perceptions they will carry with them throughout their lives.
Therefore, Standard 6 contains these themes: The Perception of Places and Regions and Changes in the Perception of Places and Regions.
Worldviews, and therefore our cultural identities, reflect multiple factors. Ideology, race, ethnicity, language, gender, age, religion, history, politics, social class, and economic status influence how we perceive the place where we live and other parts of the world. The significance that an individual or group attaches to a particular place or region may be influenced by feelings of belonging or alienation, a sense of being an insider or outsider, a sense of history and tradition or of novelty and unfamiliarity. Some places and regions hold great significance for some groups of people, but not for others. For example, for Muslims the city of Mecca is the most holy of religious places, whereas for non-Muslims it has only historical and cultural significance.
Perceptions of places and regions change. In cities, perceptions of neighborhoods change over years as they pass through cycles of decline and gentrification, and regions such as the US Great Plains, once perceived as the Great American Desert, the Dustbowl, and now the Breadbasket of America, change over decades.
Students must understand the factors that influence their own perceptions of places and regions, paying special attention to the effects that personal and group points of view can have on their understanding of the worlds of other groups and cultures. Understanding these themes enables students to reflect on their own perceptions of places and regions, thereby avoiding the dangers of egocentric and ethnocentric stereotyping of the worlds of others.
