Meaghan McCready is a psychology professor at Fresno State specializing in research methods, social psychology and an internship class. In addition to teaching, McCready is an instructor of aerial silks at a studio called Aerial Space Downtown Fresno. She described aerial silks as a circus aerial apparatus that is similar to Cirque du Soleil.

How did you get involved in aerial silks?

When I went to Fresno City College, I was in ballet and dance kinds of classes. And a professor there invited us to her company’s performance, doing aerial silks. It was at Fulton 55 in downtown. I got very inebriated and stumbled up to that director and was like, ‘I want to do this.’ She signed me up for a five-day-a-week summer intensive class. So that’s how I got into it. I’ve been doing it for over 10 years now. 

How did you become an instructor on aerial silks?

I started performing aerial silks first. After two years of practice, you can get certified to teach it. So I got my first certification, taught a few classes for a year or two, and then got a further intermediate certification, so I can teach intermediate classes.

Do you tell students in your psychology classes about your job teaching aerial silks?

I don’t always like to. Every once in a while, it’ll slip out because I have stickers on my laptop and my water bottle of our aerial studio, so students will ask. One clocked me after class recently, though. They came up to me, after noticing I stand on one foot and lift the other while I teach, and asked if I was a cheerleader or a dancer because I have really good balance. So I told them I teach aerial and used to do ballet. So sometimes it comes out. I don’t like to advertise it. I like to keep these things separate.

How does aerial silks kind of correlate with psychology, if it even does? 

I wish I had more free time to do a study on this, but I find that something very interesting psychologically happens to people who start doing aerial silks. There’s an immense amount of trust between you and the piece of fabric that’s holding you in the air. So it puts you in the moment and takes you out of any bad mental state because you must learn really rapidly. So it’s a practice with a lot of dependence and a lot of trust and safety, both with yourself and whoever rigged these fabrics from the ceiling, right? So I feel like there’s a direct mental health correlation between doing aerial silks and experiencing depression or anxiety, so you kind of have to overcome that in order to successfully do aerial silks.

How does this experience of teaching aerial silks differ from teaching like psychology on campus? 

I’ll speak to the analogy for aerial silks first. So sometimes when the student is physically upside down and they have to use their right hand to grab the fabric, it could be hard for them to understand. So I have to get really creative in the way I say things. This happens a lot in the classroom at Fresno State, too, especially with conceptual statistics for research methods. I might say something, and students will look at me just totally blank, but when I say it differently, it’s really fun to watch it register, and their faces light up. That is the best feeling. So it’s the same for both. You have to think on your feet, like, how can I say the same thing in five different ways so that all these different learners can understand?

How do you de-stress? Is there a hobby besides aerial silks that you take up?

I go to Tower Yoga a lot. A lot of people ask why I don’t teach yoga because they believe I could do it, and though it sounds like me, I keep yoga very sacred. It’s for me only because when I’m teaching, I’m so aware of everything happening, and I have a responsibility to keep everybody safe. So going to yoga and not teaching is amazing.