This paper describes an alternative model of community-engaged architecture teaching, bridging professional practice activities and speculative studio-based reflections by enabling experimentation within the context of the needs of communities. Our unique teaching framework uses a project entitled Crossing Cultures as its vehicle of investigation to experiment with forms of integration of asylum seekers and refugees into depopulated Italian villages, whilst offering students to positively impact and become an integral part of this new community, thereby, ensuring its continuity long- term. Such pedagogical experiments provide an education beyond architecture, and shape society by teaching citizenship to students.