Most students have little interest in learning the names and dates of great geographers of the past and their contributions to the field. It is much better to introduce geographic models and concepts in the context of some problem or theme that is interesting to students. Because of its origins, geography as a discipline is linked very clearly to European commercial and political ambitions and many geography texts tend to portray places from the European point of view. Of course this situation has changed somewhat because geography is now taught in all parts of the world and reflects diverse locations. There is a strong bias in North American textbook writers to assume that geography exists only in English.
Most textbooks make little effort to incorporate geography written in other parts of the world.
AP teachers are constantly wrestling with ethnocentric books that focus on the details of the suburbanization, inner city change, or folk and country-western music in the United States. It is useful for North American students see textbooks and maps in other languages or from other countries and make use of the World Wide Web to take them outside the bounds of their textbook. The geographic concepts emphasized in the AP syllabus are space, place, scale, pattern, and regionalization. In addition to these terms the course is focused on spatial interaction and spatial behavior, so all the fundamental themes that have been described elsewhere are embedded deeply in this course. The only real difference in these sets of terms that are used in this course is the elevation of the concept of scale to one of the key concepts.