In the field of teaching Arabic as a foreign language, teachers are continuously searching for new opportunities for their students to engage with the language outside of the classroom context. Such opportunities are valuable resources to develop students’ linguistic skills, cultural competencies, communicative performances and digital skills; thus, preparing them better to meet the 21st century standards for learning languages in meaningful ways. The paper, accordingly, presents a pedagogical model for using oral history as a pedagogical tool to connect Arabic classroom to local community and as a process for collecting primary source information and making them available as an open resource for other researches and teachers of Arabic. To this end, the research led a team of undergraduate Arabic students at the intermediate level to conduct an oral history digital collection project on the Arab American migrant community in central Ohio. Students collected face-to-face interviews and videos to document the experiences of Arab Americans on topics of mobility and migration, identity formation, and cultural practices. The central question of this project was to explore how Arab-Americans negotiate their hyphenated identities and adapt their cultural traditions. The mission of this project is three-fold: developing students’ communicative skils, engaging them with oral history to build their sense of civic engagement, and explore community issues, and providing the Arab American community with cultural visibility to introduce their values to a wider audience. In this presentation, the research will share the detailed stages of the project and students' involvement from conducting face-to-face video interviews to preserving and digitizing these interviews. In addition, the research will discuss the challenges associated with this project, its outcomes, pedagogical values and communal benefits. In conclusion, this model will be evaluated using a questionnaire and student’s testimonies.