This paper responds to Schademan's "What does playing cards have to do with science? A resource-rich view of African American young men", and takes a resource-rich view to explore the notion of agency and elements of cultural resources that minority and marginalised students bring to the classroom. The paper examines the deficit model, the need to adopt capacity building perspective, and a classroom study, which sought to contextualise capacity building with a group of Australian indigenous students in a science class. As science educators, we need to reject the deficit model by developing capacity building pedagogies that affirm minority and marginalised students' lived languages, experiences and knowledge in their learning.