Since their creation, universities have been seen as privileged places of knowledge and scholarship production and guarantors of the qualifications of senior executives. As elitist institutions, for years, they were only accessible to a small and select group. Women and people with special needs and less privileged social classes took a long time to access these "holy" places. The 1960s brought about a considerable change in the social role of universities by introducing the need for democratisation and social responsibility while guaranteeing quality. In most countries, that turn implied an unprecedented number of higher education students and new and fundamental challenges for managers, teaching staff, and researchers (Noui, 2020; OECD, 2003; Sancho-Gil, 2021; Teichler, 1998). Teaching staff found themselves with an increasingly diverse student population, making them rethink and transform their expectations and teaching methods (Guri-Rosenblit et al., 2007; Sancho Gil, 2013).

Students' diversity was not only connected to cultural and social dimensions. At the same time, children and youth with special needs (once levelled as 'handicapped', 'disabled', 'retarded’) won status and recognition as 'legitimate others', as beings of right (Maturana, 1990). Increasingly, in most countries, they gained access to the education system and the possibility to develop their full potential. They were able to begin to develop and reveal their skills and talents - in some cases indeed 'special' ones - and gain access to higher education and the world of skilled work.

Increasingly, universities are welcoming and resourcing a population that is itself profoundly diverse. The needs of a person with a diagnosis of deafness, blindness, Asperger's spectrum, spina bifida, dyslexia or cerebral palsy are far from homogeneous. Students with these conditions experience numerous barriers and difficulties to higher education inclusion. In fact, according to Odismet (2022), in the case of Spain, only 17.5% of people with special needs of working age have higher education, compared to 37.4% of the rest of the population. And this is not an uncommon situation. To this, we have to highlight the considerable lack of research on the challenges of special-needs students in higher education, and it hardly addresses context-based problems (Zabeli, 2021).

The research project "Learning trajectories of young university students: conceptions, strategies, technologies and contexts" (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, PID2019-108696RB-I00): https://cutt.ly/ZHB2sAH, aims at exploring university students' contextualised learning lives (Erstad, 2013; Erstad et al., 2009; Erstad et al., 2012) to reveal and understand the conceptions, strategies, technologies and contexts related to their learning. It examines young people's learning ecosystems (Sancho-Gil. J. M., & Domingo-Coscollola, 2020) and experiences to broaden the concepts and learning strategies to which they refer.

Considering the percentage of 'exceptional' university students in Europe (López Melero, 2011; Riddell, 2016), six of the fifty 'learning lives' developed with university students correspond to 'exceptional' students. This presentation gives an account of the vicissitudes of their learning lives and their experience at university.

At this phase of the research, we invited 50 university students to participate individually in four meetings with researchers (as collaborative interviews - Mason, 2002) to critically explore their lifelong learning trajectories, primarily focusing on their learning lives (Jornet, & Erstad, 2018). In the first meeting, researchers share a collection of assertions gathered from scientific publications and mediatic discourse on youth attitudes towards education and society across generations. We have selected contradictory views about contemporary youth. In the last two decades, they have been 'labelled' both as a better-prepared generation (Boschma & Groe, 2006; Howe & Strauss, 2000, Prensky, 2001) and as superficial, unable to pay attention, more fearful and conservative and much less prepared for adulthood (Carr, 2010; Desmurget, 2020; Haidt & Lukianoff, 2019; Lanham, 2006; Twenge, 2017). Through this first session, university students could reflect upon their perspectives on youth in general, generation gaps, and their ways of positioning themselves on matters of education and society nowadays. Students present the reconstruction of their learning lives from childhood to the present in the second meeting. Conceived as multimodal and rhizomatic narratives and through the use of art-based methods (Hernández & Onsès-Segarra, 2020), participants highlight places, people, activities, objects, timeframes, turning points etc. that they consider crucial to their learning paths. The third meeting focuses on learning moments, methods, and strategies they identify as relevant for their daily learning, including academic and non-academic activities undertaken inside or outside the institutional walls. Finally, in the fourth session, researchers, after dialoguing and conceptualising the information generated with the participants, share a draft of their learning trajectories for them to read, review, and contribute to the final version of the text. This presentation focuses on six learning trajectories developed with "singular" students. There are seven women and men with hearing and visual impairment, blind, Asperger, dyslexia, and Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) studying for degrees in Fine Arts, Psychology, Social Work, Computing Engineering, Sociology, and Chemistry.

This paper focuses on university students from their singularity and concludes that "university students" is not generic. Instead, university students and the university itself are diverse, consisting of a set of diversified embodied entities, and this research made the exceptional students' talents, values and abilities visible. From the perspective of academics, it is necessary to recognise students' uniqueness and needs for the joint construction of pedagogical practices appropriate to the diverse special needs. However, labelling may also act as a stigma, as teachers may often focus on students' impairments and not on their characteristics as people with diverse potential and talents. This paradox is also present in our participants' discourses, as some wish to have more institutional support. Still, at the same time, they do not want to be labelled as 'disabled', which generally implies feeling patronised or considered as unable to learn. We also found that these students can learn and develop many skills hardly found in most students. To overcome learning difficulties, they have to develop a greater degree of voluntariness, resistance, ability not to be frustrated and resilience. All in all, we have discovered that students are both vulnerable and strong. The former is reflected in their particular needs and the latter in their exceptional and singular ways of approaching learning in general. This paper has direct implications on our teaching as we know that university teaching staff may not know enough about who their students are, how they learn, and what they need. Instead, a new rich and diverse approach to teaching should be adopted to address and benefit from the singularity of these students. It also requires a new approach to teaching and learning that values and reframes the negativity of the term 'disabled'.

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