A new method using culture-based storytelling to teach maths to Aboriginal children is reaping results.

Aboriginal school children on average lag two years behind their non-Indigenous peers when it comes to maths, but according to one expert we can bridge the gap by paying better attention to culture.

"Maths and science are very much seen, from an Aboriginal point of view, as a white fella thing," said Dr Christopher Matthews, of Griffith University, who is just one of a handful of Aboriginal people to earn a PhD in mathematics.

Dr Matthews is from the Quandamooka people of Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), but grew up in Toowoomba.

"I actually got caught cheating on my two-times table when I was in grade two," he laughs.

However, that attitude changed when he discovered algebra.

"It was like an epiphany. I remember sitting there one day and thinking 'Why is this so easy?'"

Dr Matthews excelled at maths, and headed off to university, eventually gaining a PhD in applied mathematics.

He decided to help his people learn maths when he observed how often maths is relied on to make environmental decisions affecting Aboriginal land.

"We need the capacity to engage in this decision making and to review the scientific papers," he says.

And so Dr Matthews set out to develop a new way of teaching maths at school.

Chris Matthews has done a lot of soul searching about the relationship between maths and culture ( NSW Aboriginal Education Consultative Group )

Teaching maths as storytelling and dance

Dr Matthews realised you could help children struggling with maths by linking it to their own stories about the world.

"Maths involves creating symbols and putting them together to represent the real world," he said.

Most students only experience maths in the abstract form without getting to relate it to something meaningful to them, Dr Matthews said.

"As people we all want to understand the world around us and we do that through our own cultural lens.

"But fundamentally, we are looking at ways of understanding the world and that's pretty much what science and maths is."

Children are encouraged to make up stories, sometimes in the form of dance, to learn mathematical concepts ( Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers )

Brolgas, kangaroos and storm clouds

Dr Matthews' approach to teaching maths involves Aboriginal children making up stories about equations — sometimes in the form of dance.

The numbers in the equations become characters who take certain actions resulting in a particular outcome.

The actions either bring things together (addition and multiplication) or take them apart (subtraction and division).

For example, Aboriginal children turned the equation 4x2 = 8 into a dance about flying brolgas. A group of two children, acting as brolgas, flew together, and then linked up with another group of two, and then two more groups of two to become a group of eight.

Sorry, this video has expired Children make up dance about brolgas to illustrate equation

Or to illustrate 7-3 = 4, a group of seven kangaroos went out one day when three were hunted, leaving four behind.

In another equation, children grouped together to create a cloud that moved over country, and then some of them dropped off as the rain.

"The subtraction was the loss of rain from the cloud," said Dr Matthews, who now now heads up the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Mathematics Alliance (ATSIMA).

Dr Matthews is heartened to see children linking their Aboriginal identity to maths given the racism he himself experienced at school.

"I was the only Aboriginal kid in the class."

Ironically, it was this tough school experience that led Dr Matthews to bury himself in the geeky but "safe" world of maths.

Children painted up ready to dance ( Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers )

Mathematics educator Caty Morris, of ATSIMA, helped Dr Matthews evaluate the maths as dance trial and says it transformed the children's view of maths.

"They realised that maths was more than all those equations on the blackboard in the classroom. It really opened their eyes to the potential of mathematics," she said.

"I think it's a fantastic whole new way of looking at how mathematics can be taught. For one thing, you're getting the kids to 'be' the mathematics themselves."

She says Dr Matthews' approach has enormous potential in the classroom, and this potential was already starting to show — and not just for Indigenous children.

Maths for all

According to Professor Tom Cooper, the head of the YuMi Deadly Centre for maths education at the Queensland University of Technology, the principles involved in Dr Matthews' approach to maths as storytelling are "very powerful".

"It's the basis of our teaching now," he said.

The YuMi Deadly maths program aims to improve maths education for disadvantaged students, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, by adapting to the specific needs of the children. Since 2010, a total of 250 schools have adopted the program.

"You've got to look at your kids and you've got to get to know their culture. You must always start your teaching from something that interests them," Professor Cooper said.

Children must be encouraged to make up their own symbols, he says, and relate them to stories about their own world, before being expected to acquire more generic symbols used in the world of mathematics.

Children using the YuMi Deadly Maths program use their bodies to represent different numbers ( Tabitha Jos/Kingston State School )

Professor Cooper says movement is also a key feature of the program.

"All mathematics must be taught with the body," he said.

"So if we're teaching distance, then we run distances. If we're teaching numbers, everyone lies on the ground and makes numbers with their body."

He said the results of the program spoke for themselves.

"So many schools tell us that it's changed the way they teach and improved dramatically the learning they have ... We have evidence that it has improved NAPLAN."

And it is not just the obviously disadvantaged that can benefit. Professor Cooper said some elite schools had taken on the program.

"It may simply be people who don't learn well by sitting in rows and being given symbols — people who learn better by acting out," he said.

Dr Matthews believes his early failure in primary school was because his maths teacher demanded rote learning and quick recall.

"My brain just doesn't work like that," he said. "I get anxious."

It is no surprise to him that many children find maths as storytelling a preferable approach.

"We all carry our own cultural understandings and I think if you allow kids to be creative within that they can actually bring that to the table."

Hear more about Dr Christopher Matthews and his approach to teaching mathematics on RN Life Matters.