The current global context of profound environmental changes, and increasingly complex human impacts on the environment, requires a change in behavior and education to contain such impacts and their effects. Sustainability as a concept, representing the various visions and forms of knowledge and sustainability existing in the world, is increasingly highlighted in this context, as a way to deal with these problems. In this sense, an education for sustainability becomes increasingly necessary to deal with the issues of modern society. However, in order to propose this, education itself needs a structural renovation, aiming at the construction of participatory processes, not only for students and teachers in the classroom, but also by bringing into the academic environment actors, and experiences from civil society, indigenous and other traditional and marginalized groups, historically not included in these constructions. Therefore, the development of education for sustainability, and of sustainability itself, in a participatory way, goes through the deconstruction and reconstruction of the education format mostly present in the Brazilian university environment, and for this it is important to understand which are the precepts, pillars, and fundamental competencies that should serve as a basis for the construction of an education for sustainability.