Blog

By Karen Bohr, Education Guide

You must have seen him at the CAC, surrounded by children on a field trip, eagerly listening to the stories of our City of Architecture and sharing their own ideas. You might have been drawn to him gathering families around the Mobile Architecture Lab Cart to share a fun activity or engaging visitors in conversation. Or, perhaps, you noticed him leading a tour like Art Deco Skyscrapers: the Riverfront. Regardless of the volunteer role he is serving—Education Guide, Docent (class of 2015), Exhibit Host—Jeff Zurlinden sees the best of what we do at the CAC as a joyous dance. The steps are choreographed by knowledge and training. We may be leading the dance, but it doesn’t exist without the give and take of our “dance partners” (our guests) following and participating. And Jeff is a master of the dance, with the intent to “open people’s eyes and help feed their curiosity.”

This is especially true for Jeff when working with children as an Education Guide. Jeff values, respects, and enjoys children, and they know it. Giving children a sense of mastery of the material, a way to make connections between what they see, and helping them succeed is important to Jeff and his fellow Education Guides. He believes the CAC’s field trips are more meaningful than we might realize and that, regardless of neighborhood or background, children can, and often do, say something brilliant.

Jeff’s favorite moment on a field trip was at Federal Plaza while leading a group of teens from China with mixed language skills. He asked them if they thought Mies van der Rohe would like or dislike Calder’s orange-red Flamingo sculpture. A boy answered that Mies would like it because the sculpture was “like water washing over the black building.” Jeff was the first person the boy had spoken with in during the entire trip. Jeff sees this as part of the Education Guide’s mission—giving young people an opportunity to experience and talk about the power of place.

“Being an Education Guide has made me a better Docent,” says Jeff. “The inquiry-based technique we learned in our EG training helps me listen more carefully to questions, and it is much easier to tease out the interests of the participants for a more customized experience.” Jeff sees the Education Guides and education department staff as a community working together and learning from each other in a team effort to determine how to best meet the needs of the kids.

A “buildings person” who likes to wander and discover when he travels, Jeff is rounding out his life in retirement and filling in parts that were missing during his career in health care. With a masters degree in nursing, he worked as a pediatric nurse, an independent consultant supervising childbirth education, and in AIDS research. Jeff grew up in Michigan and has lived in Chicago since 1981. When he is not at the CAC, he enjoys dancing (including tap), traveling, movies, serving on the board of the Chicago Victorian Society, and studying German “just for fun.” By the way, his personal favorite styles of architecture can be found in Chicago’s neighborhoods: vernacular housing, examples of art moderne, and modest Art Deco buildings.