Relational complexity and the humane lacuna: Reframing global citizenship education through the SCALE heuristic

Abstract

This article reconceptualizes Global Citizenship Education (GCE) as a humane lacuna, a porous, searching interval where competing claims to justice press against one another. In this rendering, GCE becomes an ethical orientation toward uncertainty. An openness, a willingness to dwell with the fragile, the plural, the not-yet-coherent. Through the SCALE heuristic—skepticism, connection, allosyncrasy, liminality, and expression—the article offers both an analytic framework and a pedagogical grammar that orients practice within such a space. Empirically grounded in constructivist analyses of teacher–student dialogue, it demonstrates how ethical understanding emerges reflexively and dialogically. In a theoretical sense, Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers elucidate the layered temporalities shaping moral formation. These lenses foreground relationality, temporality, and endurance, challenging technocratic and universalist models. The humane lacuna therefore re-situates normativity within lived encounter and layered time, offering educators an alternative means of grappling with global complexity.