Dr. Engman's research interests address questions related to Indigenous/heritage language maintenance and reclamation, materials use, identity, and policy in a variety of language teaching and learning contexts.  She draws on her years of experience with Native and settler educators in the Upper Midwest of the United States to examine the intersections of language, sign, and power in the social and material world.

Recent and current work include a linguistic ethnography of bilingual pedagogies in an Ojibwe tribal school, a critical multimodal social semiotic analysis of the social media practices of high-profile Instagram teachers, and a study of intergenerational Indigenous language use on and with the land.  Dr. Engman draws on critical and qualitative methods to better understand of how expertise, relationships, and meaning emerge in interaction.