SEM - Serviço de Educação e Mediação do Museu Nacional do Traje (Education and Mediation Service of the National Costume Museum) was a project to energise the educational service of the National Costume Museum in partnership. It occurred over four school years: 2010-2011, 2011-2012, 2012-2013 and 2013-2014.
Its main objective was to publicise and interpret the museum's collections through diverse activities and events to create lasting and creative relationships with specific audiences.
If the collection was the starting point, offering a unique and multidimensional look at the man and his relationship with the world and society, the public was an integral part of constructing meaning, identity and memory.
The programme, which is closely linked to the museum's collections, the Angeja-Palmela Palace and the Monteiro-Mor Botanical Park, has been designed around four types of activities:
- The museum or school holds structured workshops for the creative development of expression and reflection. This type of activity has two working dimensions: discovery and creation. Some examples are the workshop The Museum Goes to My School, with the show "The King Goes Naked!" and the workshop around the creation of an original hat, in the case of pre-school and primary school, or "The Journey of the T-Shirt", which looked at the production chain of a simple cotton T-shirt, showing the number of kilometres and people who can intervene in such a simple garment and in which the students intervened in their T-shirt, using different artistic techniques, adapted to various age groups.
- Playful and detailed visits in which the visitor explores specific pieces from the collection, details of the palace's architecture, and discovers the park's unique ecosystem. Particular emphasis is placed on the importance of heritage conservation, mainly through the preservation of costume (the fragility of clothing, wear and tear, etc.) and the historical dimension.
- The integrated educational project, "The Museum is my second home", in which the Museum and the School work side-by-side to offer an integrated experience that blurs the boundaries between formal and non-formal education at the service of a group of students over a school year. In this context, it is worth highlighting the IEP developed with the students who were part of the Portuguese as a Mother Tongue classes at Gama Barros School, which resulted in the travelling exhibition "O Nosso Traje" (Our Costume). The working group was made up of students mainly from Africa (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe) but also from Asia (Pakistan) and Central Europe (Holland and Romania), with an average age of 16.5 years.
- "Holidays WITHOUT Stress" is a holiday programme for groups of children and young people between the ages of 5 and 15. For a week, a group develops a project - through photography, comics, dramatic arts or animated cinema - promoting teamwork and interaction between the different age groups.
This program aimed to transform the museum into a socio-educational space for cultural expression and learning, part of a community (historically and socially identified), fostering innovative learning, and educating intelligence, sensitivity and emotion.


