This article reports on how the policy context shaped the development of two elementary preservice teachers' (PSTs) literacy instructional practice. While student teaching emergent bilingual students in urban, high-poverty classrooms that utilized mandated scripted literacy curriculum, PSTs completed edTPA, a Teacher Performance Assessment, for their credential. Participants' edTPA lessons represented the only time PSTs taught literacy outside the mandated curriculum's script and in ways that were more aligned with their--and their teacher education program's--ideals. Findings from this study show that it might be possible for PSTs and teacher educators to appropriate edTPA for their own purposes.