Among social justice efforts to make curriculum more engaging and achieving for ‘less advantaged’ learners, the Funds of Knowledge (FoK) approach, as developed by Moll, Gonzalez and associates (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992), offers sound conception and a track-record. The Redesigning Pedagogies in the North project (RPiN) significantly embraced this approach (with some methodological differences). In this paper I first outline how curriculum designed around funds of knowledge with use-value in learners’ lifeworlds challenges the exchange-value power by which competitive academic curriculum selectively privileges cultural capital embodied in elite social-structural positions. I then draw on both RPiN data and FoK literature to examine problematic tendencies to build curriculum around (1) light (i.e. positive) but not dark knowledge from learners’ lifeworlds; and (2) knowledge contents but not ways of knowing and transacting knowledge (funds of pedagogy). In exploring...