Over the last two decades, increasingly scholarship has promoted pedagogies and curricular frameworks that push students to develop skills that transfer between disciplines and outside of classroom contexts. There are a number of kairotic moments that are taking hold of our society today that warrant a shift in education. As new AI tools emerge, professional career paths change, and global challenges progress, secondary education must adapt to meet the needs of contemporary learners. This dissertation examines progressive frameworks in secondary education, including Competency-Based Learning (CBL), Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), and Project-Based Learning (PBL), to understand the intersection with community engaged pedagogies in composition studies. Through this examination, this dissertation attends to the following research question: How do SEL and CBL align with the goals of critical pedagogy in terms of impact on student engagement and their ability to be critically reflective? This project details the scholarship in CBL (Levine and Patrick; Aurora Institute) and SEL (Comer; CASEL) alongside critical pedagogy (Freire; Macedo; hooks; Shor; Kincheloe), place-based pedagogy (Ball and Lai; Esposito; Gruenewald), indigenous pedagogy (Johnson; Powell; ho'omanawanui; Lyons), collaborative learning (Bruffee; Trimbur; Yonezawa and Jones; Cochran-Smith and Lytle), and community engagement (Honnet and Poulsen; Cushman). The scholarly conversation situates my IRB-approved study, "An Approach to Teaching Place, Perspective, and Partnership in Ninth Grade," which investigates the efficacy of a co-taught, interdisciplinary course grounded in CBL. Using the pilot course, Global Sustainability by Design: Place, Partnership, and Perspective as a case study, this dissertation ultimately contributes to the discussion and understanding of the ways in which CBL and SEL action values and concepts outlined in critical pedagogy, creating frameworks for implementing progressive educational approaches into high school settings. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]