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Curriculum is the totality of all experiences that learners receive inside and outside the classroom.  These experiences are devised to achieve certain objectives.  Teacher education curriculum is intended to equip teachers with necessary skills in view of the changing needs of the society in general and that of students in particular.  What professional skills would strengthen the budding teachers to meet the challenges of the different aspects of curriculum?  Development of curriculum operates at four levels – – ideological, societal, institutional and instructional.  These dimensions in any curriculum development need ample consideration.  There are two fundamental practices in any planning, that is, top-down planning and bottom-up planning.  Although bottom-up planning is more scientific, the top-down planning is most popular when it comes to curriculum development.  This paper deals with only the change necessitated due to the recent understanding about the teaching-learning processes.  The new understanding about the teaching-learning processes such as cognitive and social constructivism necessitates a new approach in classroom transaction.  However, there is a mismatch between pre-service training and requirements of present day classrooms.  There seems to be two dimension to the mismatch – – (1) What is dealt in theory is not finding proper application in classrooms and (2) What is practiced in pre-service programme is different from what is required in regular classrooms.  There are very strong observations about the inadequacy of teacher education curriculum in the Kerala Curriculum Framework (2007).   However, curriculum development process may magnify and exaggerate certain features (elements) of curriculum and throw others out of focus.

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