A teacher's guide covering everything from the origins of Salsa; different styles of salsa dancing, a 20 week learning syllabus of moves from Cuba, New York, LA and Colombia, teaching methods, learning styles and how to start your own salsa dance practice. This book starts with my personal experience of salsa dance and explains the history of salsa from a worldwide historical view point. It traces England's influence on the roots of salsa dancing and the development of the UK salsa scene. This book is divided into practical guidance and theoretical exercises. The book will tell you about the different ways to teach salsa, the rules and regulations you must follow and how to set-up a salsa dance school. It shows you everything you need to set yourself up as a salsa dance teacher.

This 387 page handbook includes a compendium of 68 salsa dance positions illustrated with 330 figures, an annotated curated list of 84 links to free online lessons from expert instructors, and a comprehensive dictionary of salsa dance terminology. A salsa dance combination is comprised of two or more salsa dance patterns, each pattern covering two bars of music. Every salsa dance pattern begins and ends in a dance position. One can view the salsa dance pattern as the artful transition from a start position to an end position over eight beats of music. Because salsa dance is made up of combinations, and combinations are made up of patterns, one can view salsa dance as an aesthetically pleasing progression through a series of dance positions over the course of a song. Expert salsa dancers know how to get into and out of myriad salsa dance positions in interesting ways. Knowing how to do this can help increase your salsa dance repertoire. This is facilitated by knowing your dance positions. Learn how to break down elaborate salsa combinations into individual components by name. This allows you to pick up new patterns more quickly. It also makes it easier to remember a pattern or combination you learned previously. This will help you to learn from other dancers. The second book in this series shows how to break down combinations into patterns. To best understand combinations and patterns, first know your positions. To truly know your positions, be able to identify them and call them by name. This handbook will show you how to do that. The key insight is that every pattern begins with a start position, and finishes with an end position. This handbook enumerates those positions and teaches the names. Once you learn the position names you will be able to write down a combination in terms of its patterns, by giving the start and end position of each pattern in the combination. This handbook will help you identify common elements of LA Style salsa dance by name. When you have the vocabulary to describe the building blocks, you can understand what you see on the dance floor. You’ll be able to break down a combination into component patterns. You’ll be able to identify the positions that make up a pattern. Then you will then be able to compose new patterns of your own. Salsa dance elements covered in this handbook include steps, handholds, turns, combs, arm and leg stylings, positions, patterns, and combinations. Handholds covered include left to right hold, right to left hold, parallel hold, handshake hold, reverse handshake hold, cross hold, and reverse cross hold. Turns covered include cross body lead, reverse cross body lead, single right turn, single left turn, inside turn, outside turn, and enchufa turn. Positions covered include apart positions, open position, closed position, half open position, handshake hold, hammerlock, half Hammerlock, cross hold, reverse cross hold, neck loop, arm hook, cuddle, butterfly, sombrero, and wraps.

Salsa Dancing in Gym Shoes: Developing Cultural Competence to Foster Latino Student SuccessCultural competence is a critical skill teachers must posses if they are going to connect with racially diverse students. Misunderstanding or ignorance of the Latino value system, history, and culture create barriers between teachers and students that significantly deteriorate their potential for learning. Consider how you would typically greet a friend or a relative. Perhaps you would shake hands or even hug. In the Latino culture, it's common to greet loved ones with an embrace and a kiss on the cheek. Anything less may be taken as an affront. If something as simple as "hello" can create tension, how challenging is it to navigate teaching and learning in the classroom? Salsa Dancing in Gym Shoes takes a close look at interactions between Latino students and Non-Latino teachers in ways that develop and expand the cultural competence of teachers. Preservice and veteran educators alike will benefit from current research and theories on Latinos and education as well as the personal essays presenting that reveal the raw perspective of Latinos as they deal with racism and marginalization. Educators will have a deeper understanding of the Latino experience and practical strategies for creating a positive and safe environment for learning.

Today the United States has little leverage to promote change in Cuba. Indeed, Cuba enjoys normal relations with virtually every country in the world, and American attempts to isolate the Cuban government have served only to elevate its symbolic predicament as an "underdog" in the international arena. A new policy of engagement toward Cuba is long overdue. —From the Introduction As longtime U.S. diplomats Vicki Huddleston and Carlos Pascual make painfully clear in their introduction, the United States is long overdue in rethinking its policy toward Cuba. This is a propitious time for such an undertaking—the combination of change within Cuba and in the Cuban American community creates the most significant opening for a reassessment of U.S. policy since Fidel Castro took control in 1959. To that end, Huddleston and Pascual convened opinion leaders in the Cuban American community, leading scholars, and international diplomats from diverse backgrounds and political orientations to seek common ground on U.S. policy toward Cuba. This pithy yet authoritative analysis is the result. In the quest for ideas that would support the emergence of a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic Cuba—one in which the Cuban people shape their political and economic future—the authors conducted a series of simulations to identify the critical factors that the U.S. government should consider as it reformulates its Cuba policies. The advisers' wide-ranging expertise was applied to a series of hypothetical scenarios in which participants tested how different U.S. policy responses would affect a political transition in Cuba. By modeling and analyzing the decisionmaking processes of the various strategic actors and stakeholders, the simulations identified factors that might influence the success or failure of specific policy options. They then projected how key actors such as the Cuban hierarchy, civil society, and the international and Cuban American communities

Emily is a Jewish girl from the suburbs of New York. Her mother has family in Puerto Rico, but Emily has never had contact with them—ever. Then Emily’s grandmother dies and Emily is forced to go to the Caribbean for her funeral. Buttoned-up Emily wants nothing to do with her big, noisy Puerto Rican family, until a special person shows her that one dance can change the beat of your heart.

Learn to dance, and skyrocket your partner dance abilities! Dance secrets I wish I knew when I first started salsa dancing that will help beginners get started in salsa dance and have more fun, a quicker learning curve, and greater success on the dance floor. What every novice must know (and what I wish I knew) before learning to salsa. Dance Secret's Salsa BootCamp is a clear and concise guide to what you need to know during your first few months of salsa dancing. The concepts presented apply not only to beginner salsa dancers, but also to dancers of all levels, and many styles of partner dancing. You won't find the concepts in this short and direct book anywhere else - and yes, they will help you in any and all partner dances! They are proven shortcuts to success in dance and you'll love what they do for your dancing skills. Want to excel in salsa? Want to learn faster, surpassing others in your classes? Do you have questions about learning salsa that no one's been able to answer? This book is for you! Check out DanceSecrets.com for more books and articles, and get a FREE Learn to Salsa Dance DVD! In this manual, I'll walk you through all of the mysteries of the salsa superstars and show you how to get the most from your lessons and social dancing, and above all, how to totally delight in your new salsa superstar status! Having fun is the most important thing (actually, you'll find it hard not to)! Salsa begins and ends with this. That's what dancing is all about. Relax, take a deep breath, and enjoy! SalsaCrazy.com is one of the world's premier Latin dancing websites. Founded in 1996, SalsaCrazy.com was born of a passion to dance, and a desire to show others how fantastic salsa dance can be. As our first instructor told us, It will change your life. SalsaCrazy has dance instructional videos in numerous styles of dance (all available on Amazon.com). Give salsa dancing a try, and you'll find a vibrant world of fantastic people, exciting nightlife, and perhaps a side of yourself you've always wanted to free. We've created a series of high quality DVD's to showcase how easy and fun salsa dancing can be! Find salsa dance videos, merengue videos, Latin dance videos, and all styles of dance instruction with SalsaCrazy on Amazon.com (Search Amazon.com for "SalsaCrazy" or "DanceCrazy" to see all of our dance instructional products). Salsa is a dance that can be enjoyed by everyone, with fantastic music, a rich history, and an unbeatable, intoxicating, rhythm. Take SalsaCrazy home and learn to salsa dance today!

“You might think that dancing doesn’t have a lot to do with social research, and doing social research is probably why you picked this book up in the first place. But trust me. Salsa dancing is a practice as well as a metaphor for a kind of research that will make your life easier and better.” Savvy, witty, and sensible, this unique book is both a handbook for defining and completing a research project, and an astute introduction to the neglected history and changeable philosophy of modern social science. In this volume, Kristin Luker guides novice researchers in: knowing the difference between an area of interest and a research topic; defining the relevant parts of a potentially infinite research literature; mastering sampling, operationalization, and generalization; understanding which research methods best answer your questions; beating writer’s block. Most important, she shows how friendships, non-academic interests, and even salsa dancing can make for a better researcher. “You know about setting the kitchen timer and writing for only an hour, or only 15 minutes if you are feeling particularly anxious. I wrote a fairly large part of this book feeling exactly like that. If I can write an entire book 15 minutes at a time, so can you.”