This paper will discuss pedagogical challenges of Arabic language instruction in higher education in the US and study abroad programs in the Middle East and North Africa. We will discuss how indigenous ‘land-based’ and ‘Mujawara’ approaches to teaching and learning, when properly integrated, can help both students and their instructors as they navigate teaching /learning language and intercultural territories. The model of language instruction that we practiced for many decades has been based on prescribed methods that were based primarily on teaching Arabic in the classroom where teachers and students followed a defined textbook path with a few possible changes to content. Although textbook designers recently started to open to teaching other varieties of the Arabic language, pedagogies have remained static and somehow detached from their contexts. When our students travel abroad, they have the opportunity to live and speak with communities that speak the language they are learning. They also experience unique ways of learning from their peers and friends that might not be familiar to language teachers who are trained in western methods. We will discuss how language is deeply related to communities and spaces of interaction and how the Arabic teachers’ communities can use ‘land-based approaches’ and ‘Mujawara approaches’, which are indigenous ways of knowing and learning, to foster the integration of language communities in the process of intercultural and language learning while learning from elders of host communities.